


Outside

by greygerbil



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-04
Updated: 2017-05-02
Packaged: 2018-09-21 22:41:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 23,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9569918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greygerbil/pseuds/greygerbil
Summary: War veteran Baze Malbus has gotten used to life on the streets to the point he's convinced it doesn't bother him anymore. He goes generally ignored and he likes it that way. However, the West Jedha City Tai Chi Centre next to which he has built his shack has a blind owner who takes notice of him.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a brilliant kinkmeme prompt which specified all the basics of this story: homeless veteran Baze living next to a tai chi studio and meeting the owner, Chirrut.

Things were alright now.

They were not good, but they were level. Baze wasn’t being shot at. He wasn’t running with dust in his eyes and sand in his throat. No one bled out over his shaking hands. That wet thing he might step on in an alley was a dead rat or a deflated ball, not half of someone’s brain (although, for the rest of Baze’s life, that image would flash before his eyes whenever his foot sank in where he expected hard ground).

It had been quite the experience, getting to the point where ‘it could be worse’ no longer applied. When he’d come back from the war, after a bullet to the right knee had left it just a bit too stiff to pass inspection again, Baze’s days had been spent desperately avoiding that edge of reason. It was the only line he still knew, that very end of the road. All other degrees before it had vanished and so there was no motivation to keep his apartment or a job after his honourable discharge. His nightmares kept him up whether he tried to sleep in a bed or on the ground. There was persistent fear clawing the back of his skull whether he was aimlessly wandering by the side of the highway or stuck in a warehouse unloading crates.

Without responsibilities and people to answer to, he could at least avoid the startled gazes when he jumped and reached for a gun he didn’t have when someone dropped their glass or slammed a door. He also didn’t have to pretend to care about fair shift distribution, weekly profit margins and workplace gossip, which seemed impossible after looking death in the eye so many times he’d gotten acquainted to his face.

There was no one important enough to pretend he was normal for, either, because he didn’t enjoy talking to people anymore. Usually, strangers had an urge to thank him for his service, but, homeless, scarred and feeling achient at thirty-seven, he was not what they imagined and the comment usually just made him sarcastic. He could spare everyone the awkward moment by avoiding it entirely. His family had been dead before he’d entered the military; his friends, all made there, were dead by the time he’d left. The few distant contacts who remained from childhood were ashamed for him now. Their condescension made Baze want to punch their faces in, so he stopped speaking to them, too.

But things were alright. Baze had always been a realist. In life, you got what you put in and he hadn’t kept it together well enough, so he was here, on the streets, and that was fair enough. He was too big and mean-looking for most people to think about starting shit with him, and he could still make an argument with his fists if he needed to. The Holy City had enough nooks and crannies to vanish into. The weather was always cold, but you got used to it.

He never begged and he never went to any charity. He looked for food in the trash. With a little trial and error, you soon found out what was edible. He scavenged landfills for clothes. He washed in the river and drank rain water. Being no one’s burden was the one thing still important to him. No one should suffer for his own foolishness.

At night, Baze liked climbing on the ruins of the old temple nestled against the city walls. The place had once belonged to the Guardian of the Whills, some long-dead cult that Baze knew nothing about but for the fact that they had sure known how to carve some weird statues. Some of those creatures, even though their odd features had been washed smooth by centuries of rain and hail and snow beating down on them, could never have been human. It was a restricted area, battleground of petty local politics since ages forgotten, too dangerous to let people go sightseeing on it, but too much of a landmark to simple smash it all and build some pretty apartment houses in its place.

In a silly way, its state in eternal useless broken limbo reminded Baze of himself. He’d sit on the toppled statues and hide from storms behind collapsed archways and crumbling walls and he felt rather welcome. There were no expectations here. Everything was already over, all the cards played, and now they waited for what was to come without any hope left to be crushed.

Since the ruins, with their falling stones and occasional police patrols, really weren’t the place you actually wanted to sleep at, Baze had built himself a small shack in an alley about half an hour by foot away from the old temple. It was made of three chipboards with a torn shower curtain for a door. The ceiling was a plastic plane he’d managed to attach with rusty nails beaten in with a stone. For the nights, which were heralded by freezing winds in winter, it was shelter enough.

The wall it was up against was the left-hand side of the _West Jedha City Tai Chi Centre_. A squat, two-story building with a flat roof, which might have once been a garage or storage facility, it couldn’t exactly be called beautiful, but he’d guess it made decent business. People came for classes all day into the evening, filtering in and out of the glass doors in the front in regular intervals. Through the entrance, Baze had seen into a small anteroom bathed in comfortably soft, dimmed light. It illuminated, at the centre of the back wall, a juniper bonsai tree on a wooden table. Its tiny stem was wound like a snake.

The owner had to live above the studio, for Baze never noticed him come in the morning or leave in the evening. He had seen him tape paper signs on the inside of the glass doors before, though, usually printed messages about changed class times. The man was blind, it didn’t take a genius to notice. His walking stick was wooden and longer than the usual varieties, with metal ends but no handle. When Baze saw him stride out the door by chance, he always noticed how brisk his pace was, without the hesitation one might think a blind person would be better off showing. Not like he didn’t know these streets, Baze supposed. Not that it really mattered to him. It was just one of the many things that went through his head during the day.

Generally, he only noticed the what happened at the Tai Chi Centre because he was around a lot and it wasn’t like he had anything better to do; but sometimes, when the dark of the night hid him, he would throw a quick, deliberate glance into the window that went out onto the alley his hut was in. The class room was arranged so that he had a view on the backs of the students, but was looking straight at their instructor who, of course, saw nothing in return. He was fascinating to watch, Baze would admit, especially having gone through combat training himself. There was a fluidity to his movements paired with a pointed precision and force that belied the imagined fragility his blindness bestowed on him.

Baze always tore himself away quickly. He didn’t want to get in trouble by looking like a voyeur, just in case anyone noticed him. This alley was an okay deal so far.

-

Obviously good things never lasted, though. One Wednesday morning, Baze was busy repairing a crack in a chipboard with some extra wood and nails he’d broken off from an old armchair he’d found out on the sidewalk when he heard the twin sound of steps and the tapping of a stick.

“You have been here for a while,” a voice said. It was mild but firm, impossible to read.

Baze got to his feet and came to stand before the Tai Chi Centre’s owner. Baze was taller than the man, broader in the shoulders, wild-haired and with an expression that seemed displeased even when he felt neutral. However, he wasn’t going to have much luck intimidating a blind man with his looks. He was briefly distracted by his, though: Baze had never before seen eyes like that, with no pupils at all, just milky white like the full moon.

“How would you know?” he asked, unkindly. It was too brash, but he’d never been a fan of beating around the bush. “Did your students complain about me?”

“No, but you have been here long enough for me to learn your footsteps. Something is wrong with your leg.”

The answer was coupled with a smile. It was a little too impish to hide that the man seemed to be satisfied he could confound Baze. He really had, to his credit. Baze didn’t like it.

“My receptionist pointed you out to me first, though,” Chirrut admitted, after a moment, still bemused.

“You want me to go?” Baze asked. He supposed that was the end of this conversation, anyway, and he might as well skip to it. They both knew the man could call the police and have Baze evicted on grounds of disturbing his flow of business, even if he didn’t.

“No,” the blind man said, simply. “Would you like something to eat?”

It took Baze a moment to shift gears. He’d braved himself for accusations, not offers.

“I can take care of myself,” he answered. No gifts. He was not a beggar.

“Very well. Have a good day and may the Force of others protect you…”

It had been such a long time that anyone had cared what his name was that Baze was startled into an answer by the questioning tone.

“Baze,” he said, before he could amend his words to ‘who’s asking?’, like he should have. Inwardly, he cursed himself.

“Baze,” the man repeated, completing his sentence. “My name is Chirrut.”

Chirrut pulled the lapels of his long black coat a little tighter around his neck as he turned and left the alleyway, moving out of Baze’s view around the corner of the building.

-

The day after, Baze had already boxed himself into his shack for the night when he heard the sound of metal scraping against metal. Like a rabbit suspecting a fox in the bushes, he found himself sitting still, not breathing, to pinpoint where the noise originated. It took him a moment to place it, but it came from down the alleyway, and he realised that the only thing metallic in the smooth concrete wall was the frame of the window that he sometimes peeked through.

At first, Baze wanted to ignore it. It was nothing, he told himself, just some rat or bird playing with a loose screw on the ground. However, the hair on his arms was standing. Could be some asshole was trying to break into the studio. They might try his shack next. No locks, and usually it was a low risk to try and steal something from a sleeping homeless guy, too.

Crouching down, Baze pushed aside the dotted curtain and looked out, his hand tight around a thick metal rod he kept under his moth-eaten pillow. However, there was no two-bit thug trying to get in, but rather Chirrut himself leaning out of the open window, fumbling with the hinges used to tilt it.

“What’s wrong?” Baze asked, dropping the rod on the blanket so it wouldn’t make a noise. He got up.

“Ah,” Chirrut said, straightening. His head turned vaguely in the direction of Baze’s voice as he kept running his fingers over the hinge. “I’m not sure. The window won’t close properly.”

That sounded decidedly like not his problem, so Baze should leave him to it and try to sleep before it got so cold he’d be distracted by the temperature. However, even from where he stood, he already saw what was wrong.

“The latch is loose. You’ve got to tighten it. Got a screwdriver small enough?”

“I _think_ I do. I’m not much of an engineer.”

It was only a matter of a minute and it couldn’t hurt to give the man whose property he slept on a reason to think well of him, Baze thought. He hadn’t exactly shown himself from his sweet side yesterday – and he’d always been better at repairing things than being nice, so this was a good opportunity. Being helpful was of more use than friendly words, anyway.

“Bring your toolbox if you’ve got one. I’ll see what I can do,” he told him.

Chirrut nodded his head and stepped away from the window. Baze saw him walk through the door leading out of the wide practice room. He wore a simple black silk uniform, the kind Baze remembered his teacher in from when he’d practiced kung fu as a child, composed of a shirt with a Mandarin collar and wide trousers which sat loose but were not so big they got in the way. His feet were bare.

Chirrut returned moments later. When he opened the toolbox, Baze saw that the instruments laid out in perfect order.

“Do you keep them in line like that so you know which is which, or did you just never use them before?” Baze asked.

Chirrut’s smile was open, not at all bothered by the mocking tone. “The latter. I make up for much of my lost sight with my other senses, but putting my hands into any sort of complicated machinery seems to be asking for trouble.”

While he surveyed the tools, Baze found himself dwelling on that word, ‘lost’. Chirrut hadn’t been born blind, then. He picked out screwdrivers one after the other, trying them out until he had found the one that fit perfectly. With his other hand, he held the loose parts together so that they lined up as he tightened the latch.

His father had been an adept at this sort of DIY stuff. Though he’d not stuck around past Baze’s twelfth birthday, hadn’t paid much attention to him before that, either, he’d let him hold the tools when Baze streaked around the garage hoping for some attention. The bastard had never taught him anything else useful, but Baze had at least taken care not to forget these accidental lessons.

“Should work now,” he told Chirrut, putting the screw drivers back in their proper order. Chirrut ran his fingertip gently over the tightened latch. Baze could feel warmth from inside. The radiator was probably under the window sill.

“Thank you for your help,” Chirrut said.

“It’s nothing.”

Baze felt a sudden surge of something he hadn’t in a long time: accomplishment. Stupid, really. Wasn’t like he had done anything huge here.

Still, he backed off before Chirrut could ruin his moment by offering him something in return, like Baze was a dog who’d performed a trick. Pity came very easy these days and he didn’t handle it well.

“Well, night,” he muttered.

“Sleep well, Baze,” Chirrut answered, smiling once more before he pulled the window shut.


	2. Chapter 2

Over the course of the next couple of weeks, whenever Chirrut came by and heard Baze in the alley, he would greet him and stay around for a moment to say a few words about the weather or a class he’d led or ask about Baze’s day. Baze never gave him much encouragement, but had to admit to himself that, from time to time, when he saw Chirrut stopping in front of the alleyway trying to figure out if Baze was around, he’d purposefully knock over an empty tin can or get up to noisily fix the plastic pane of his hut when he really didn’t need to. One Wednesday, he found himself saying hello first.

Baze had never been a people person and it was even harder when it felt like he was standing on slanted ground looking up at everyone else. However, Chirrut did not grate on his nerves like other people did. There were no heartfelt speeches, no handouts, nothing that made it seem like Chirrut saw him as anything but his next-door neighbour. The guy was a bit of a weirdo for that if nothing else, but Baze enjoyed the chance to use his voice again before he forgot how to string together full sentences.

The weather had taken a turn for the wet lately, hailing in the winter months which always brought torrents of rain and mushy snow. Baze had spent the last couple of days looking for more plastic and foil to cover the ground of his hut with. This morning, after being woken up by the sound of the supermarket trucks, he had made his first round early, but found nothing of use.

Under the diffuse light of a sun crouching behind fat grey clouds, the street before the Tai Chi Centre laid mostly empty at eight on a Saturday. This western part of Jedha close to the ancient city walls, beyond which Jedha had long expanded, was a blue-collar worker area, all concrete slabs with nothing but a few corner shops and chain stores strewn about the ground floor levels of the samey-looking apartment buildings.

Baze let his gaze wander idly over the street. He saw a mother dragging two yawning children along by their hands, a postman digging through his mailbag, and then he noticed Chirrut on the other side of the sidewalk. Three bulging paper bags were precariously balanced in his arms while he was still holding on to his walking stick. Baze thought about greeting him when he saw that a jogger was coming up hard behind Chirrut. She was wearing big headphones and mouthing along to the lines of a song.

Baze expected her to dodge Chirrut, but instead, she barrelled right into his shoulder. Chirrut just managed to catch himself on his staff, but the bags crashed to the ground. Apples rolled into the gutter, a package of rice broke and spilled onto the pavement, two pieces of cheese stopped only at the wheel of a parked car.

“Get out the way!” the jogger, startled out of her reverie, snapped at Chirrut, jumping over a cucumber as she ran on.

Chirrut hesitated for a moment, but perhaps he heard her quickly receding footsteps, for he said nothing, merely took a deep breath and got down on one knee, feeling for his groceries with sweeping movements.

Baze crossed the street and picked up a honey melon that had rolled into the middle of it on the way. As he approached, Chirrut was distractedly frowning at the rice he’d just put his hand in, wiping the grains off on his jeans.

“Put this back in the bag, I’ll help you,” Baze told him, as he pressed the melon into a hand that had wet rice still stuck to it.

The blind man lifted his head.

“Baze?”

“I saw that idiot running into you,” Baze said, collecting a package of sausages and a bushel of carrots. “Guess it hurts some people to pay attention.”

“Many of us spend our days wrapped in our own concerns only... but not all of us, evidently,” Chirrut added, gesturing at Baze with the melon before he found his paper bag and stuffed it back inside. “Thank you.”

Baze grunted, unsure what to say. He had no intention of making anyone think he was an altruist, he just wanted to be left alone these days. Still, he wasn’t going to stand by while a blind man crawled on the ground trying to find his food. He might not be a good person, but he wasn’t a complete bastard.

He collected everything he could find and gave the items to Chirrut so he could bag them. Other than the rice, there were a couple things with notches and tears, but most of the stuff would just need a rinse.

“If you have a little more time, would you take one of the bags and help me bring it inside? Perhaps I have a chance to get my food home if I can concentrate on something else than holding all this.”

“You think I have a busy schedule these days?” Baze asked, picking up two bags so that Chirrut could take the one left over and his cane in the other hand as he got up.

“I don’t know what you do with your days. What do you do with your days?” Chirrut asked, smiling, his unseeing gaze going forward. He led the way towards the Tai Chi Centre with sure steps.

“What you’d expect,” Baze said, with a shrug. Find food, build his nest. The most basic of conscious activities for a living creature which had become the most complex ones he could keep up on a regular basis.

“I see you’re very talkative today,” Chirrut said, still smiling. Switching his staff to the hand that held the bag, he fished his keys out of his pockets with the other, gently dragging his knuckles over the door until he had found the lock.

Having seen the room from outside through the glass doors so many times, Baze felt like he was stepping into a TV screen as he entered the front hall, as if this was not quite real. The ground was scratched wood panels and the walls had been pained in a muted white colour leaning towards a soft yellow. The only decoration were a whiteboard with course times next to the door and the bonsai alone on its table. To the right, an open doorway showed a desk with a computer and two doors adorned with a black stick figure each, one wearing a skirt, which Baze assumed were the changing rooms. However, Chirrut waved him towards the left where a wooden door was decorated with the word ‘private’. It led up a narrow, unlit staircase towards the entrance of what Baze thought to be Chirrut’s apartment.

“You sure you wanna take me up here?” Baze asked, following behind him.

“Why not?”

“You don’t know me. I could rob you.”

Again, Chirrut searched the lock like he had before. Looking at the back of him, Baze found that his shoulders were relaxed.

“To greet you, I’ve been walking into an alley between houses which is barely broad enough for me to stretch my arms out. Seeing is not my forte, but I doubt people passing by would have a good view on what happens in there, since it must be in the shadows. If you really wanted to rob me, you could have hit me over the head with something and stolen my keys anytime you wished,” Chirrut said, with a smile in his voice. “Your motivation seems lacklustre. I’ll take my chances.”

It wasn’t like Baze hadn’t considered that before – not as something that he wanted to do, but something he was well aware he could do. You didn’t survive on the streets being naïve, but you could potentially while running a Tai Chi Centre, so for a moment, he was silenced by Chirrut’s words. The fact that he wasn’t just friendlier than was good for him but had taken a calculated risk made this whole situation a little more bizarre. Why would he do that for a perfect stranger?

“Please, come in,” Chirrut urged, when Baze stood rooted to the spot thinking this over. He quickly picked up his pace.

The hallway they stepped into was dark as well and without windows, just like the staircase. Chirrut leaned his stick next to the hatrack and moved with just one hand outstretched to tap the wall, a shadow to Baze’s eyes. Suddenly, Chirrut stopped.

“The light switch is on the left. Sorry, I forget.”

Baze pressed it and closed the door behind himself. In the light that flickered alive above, he had a better view on the living room to his right. There was a bookcase full of CDs and some thick books with raised dots for titles where letters would usually be. Everything was very orderly, the furniture mostly stacked against the walls. Ivy cascaded down from a windowsill, curling against the blue carpet. There were a small CRT-TV and a computer on an otherwise empty desk.

Baze followed Chirrut. On the fridge in the kitchen, he noticed a piece of garishly green paper with a smiling face out of noodles glued onto it.

“Who made that picture?” Baze asked, wondering if Chirrut had kids.

“The one on the fridge? One of the children from the junior class. He wanted to draw something but then remembered I couldn’t see it, so his mother suggested he make it out of pasta instead,” Chirrut said. “I thought it was clever. You can put the bags on the counter.”

Baze did so, looking around. Aside from the pasta picture, the room was low on decorative objects, the walls all blank – obviously, Baze thought to himself. There were a white plate with some smooth stones on it and a cactus on the small wooden dining table. The plant looked to have a soft white fur rather than thorns, but Baze knew better than to touch it. They could be quite deceiving.

“Would you like one?”

He’d been busy taking in the room, so he was surprised to find Chirrut holding a plastic cup with strawberry yoghurt under his nose. There was a hole punched in the lid. In the other hand, Chirrut held a cup were the side was cracked open.

“They’re broken, but I don’t want two now,” Chirrut explained. “Don’t you like strawberries?”

“I do.”

Slowly, Baze took the yoghurt. Not accepting food gifted to him had been one of his rules to make his existence more bearable by feeling like he was still a self-sustaining adult, but Chirrut’s argument was as simple as it was convincing. There were two damaged yoghurts and someone had to eat them.

Chirrut placed his yoghurt down on the small table with its two chairs, muttering something about spoons. As he stretched out his arm for the drawer, the sleeve of his pullover rode up. Frowning, Baze noticed colourful bruises blooming in the shape of a handprint, the mark of fingers that had curled much too tightly around him. As if realising Baze’s gaze was on him, Chirrut quickly pulled his hand to his chest, out of Baze’s view. When he turned around to the table, the sleeve was back up.

His mouth was half-open already, but Baze stopped himself. Probably just an injury from training, right? Even if it wasn’t, it was none of his business. It wasn’t like they were friends. Still, there was a weight resting at the bottom of his stomach now. The movement with which Chirrut had covered himself had been much too hasty. People weren’t so secretive after an accident.

Trying to push the thought away, he sat down at the table opposite of Chirrut, poking at the yoghurt with his spoon. Usually, Baze stayed away from products with milk he found in the garbage. They spoiled too fast and if they didn’t make you sick, they at least tasted sour. He didn’t like admitting to himself that he had missed them. He didn’t like admitting to himself that there was something to be said for a kitchen with a heater and actual chairs, either. However, Baze wasn’t twenty anymore and his bones ached from the wet and cramped space he slept in and were thankful for cushions and warmth.

“I’m lucky you came by to help. I don’t know if I’d had the patience to search until I’d have found all my groceries,” Chirrut said, after thoughtfully dragging his spoon out of his mouth. “The Force must have sent you.”

“The Force?”

Baze snorted. He’d heard Chirrut use the phrases before – ‘may the Force of others be with you’ and all that –, but those were just that, meaningless niceties. Apparently, Chirrut actually believed in that stuff. Sure, about what felt like three lifetimes ago, so had Baze, but that was before the war when he had still been a stupid boy.

“I spend half my day sitting in that hut by your studio. That’s coincidence, not the Force.”

“The Force might have led you to place it there,” Chirrut said, smartly.

Baze rolled his eyes.

“The Force made people build an alleyway that keeps out the wind from all directions, huh?” he asked, the corners of his mouth twitching against his will.

If Chirrut had another clever comment, it was pre-empted by the sound of a key turning in the lock of the front door.

“Chirrut?” called a woman’s voice

“Jyn? I’m in the kitchen.”

For a brief moment, Baze expected to see Chirrut’s wife. It wouldn’t have surprised him if he’d had one, except for the fact that he’d never really noticed anyone else coming and going as regularly as him. Still, the man was affable with a working head on his shoulders and no one could deny he was handsome.

However, the girl who entered looked a bit too young for the part and was also accompanied by three men about her age. Chirrut stared at the ceiling as he listened, smiling briefly.

“Did you bring everybody, Kay?”

“They followed me, like lost puppies,” one of the newcomers said. He had dark skin but surprisingly bright eyes and a look on his face as if he’d bitten on an especially sharp grain of pepper. Behind him stood a man with a ponytail and another, pale-faced, with alert eyes. All four of them weren’t looking at Chirrut, but Baze.

Chirrut got up, his empty yoghurt cup and spoon in hand.

“This is Baze. He helped me with my groceries. Baze, these are Jyn Ersa, Cassian Andor, Bodhi Rook and Kay Tuso.”

Ersa and Andor nodded their heads in turn. Rook, the one with the ponytail, lifted his hand in a greeting. He was still smiling and Tuso had the sort of face that suggested that his annoyed expression may be a permanent feature, but Ersa and Andor were looking at Baze with blatant distrust.

“Kay is my receptionist. The others just seem to like it here a lot.”

The gently mocking tone was picked up on by Rook with a laugh, but Tuso bristled.

“ _I_ didn’t invite them to hang around and get me fired some day,” he said.

“I doubt they will. You are all very early, though.”

“Class got cancelled, our professor was sick,” Ersa explained, as she walked to look into one of the full paper bags on the counter. Baze could see her still glancing at him from the corner of her eyes as she began pulling out aubergines and oranges.

“And I don’t have to start my tour until midday,” Rook added.

“If anything doesn’t have packaging, I have to wash it first,” Chirrut said, noting the rustling of the paper. “Kay, have you finished the plan for the Tuesday classes?”

“Obviously.”

Baze got to his feet. He didn’t much care for the sudden crowd and he had a feeling that Andor and Ersa had seen him outside before, or Kay had mentioned him to them; Baze remembered Chirrut telling him the receptionist had noticed him first. Whereas Chirrut didn’t seem to question Baze’s motives, Baze couldn’t fault them for being more jaded. He might not have trusted a total stranger with his blind friend, either. Hell, he had brought the idea of a robbery up to Chirrut himself. The underlying implication of their doubt was an insult, though, and Baze was sharply reminded why he didn’t even try to spend time with people anymore.

“I’ll go,” he said. “See you around.”

“Oh – alright. Until later, Baze.”

Before he slipped out, he saw Chirrut turn towards the noise of his footsteps, but he didn’t let him get another word in. Instead, he hurried down the short hallway and out the door, taking the stairs two steps at a time. When he pushed open the glass doors, stepping back into a grey morning as cold as crystal, he breathed more freely.

Time to forget that he may have actually enjoyed himself for a moment there. Wasn’t a point to it.


	3. Chapter 3

“Ah, Baze. I was looking for you earlier.”

Baze laid down his rust-stained hammer with the broken handle and rubbed his burning eyes, blinking down the alley. Since Chirrut didn’t seem to be about to ask him to give up his camp, he’d figured he might as well reinforce the walls, but he was in serious danger of smashing his own fingers to pulp in his attempt. Last night, he hadn’t slept well, which for his already low standards meant he hadn’t slept at all. Instead, he’d stared up at the plastic plane, willing away the sound of imaginary gunshots in the night and the idea that something sharp would punch through the pitiful cover overhead and ram into his stomach, tearing holes in his guts and flesh, the damp ground underneath soaking with his blood.

There was nothing to be done about it. Some nights were good, some were bad. Still, it had left him drained.

“What’s going on?” he asked, unable to make his tone sound less gruff, or his voice less like an old hinge.

“I brought you this.”

Scatterbrained and bleary-eyed as he was, Baze hadn’t noticed the cardboard cup of strawberries wrapped in plastic film Chirrut was holding in his free hand. Before he had a moment to protest, Chirrut lifted his staff.

“You helped me the other day. It’s not a gift, it’s compensation,” Chirrut argued against the protest he hadn’t allowed Baze to come to.

“I didn’t ask for compensation.”

“And that selfless kindness is probably why I’m so inclined to give it to you. You did say you liked strawberries.”

The smart smile on Chirrut’s lips made Baze huff a short laugh against his will.

“You’re used to having the last word, huh?”

He took the strawberries from Chirrut’s hand. It was rare he got fresh fruit like this. You didn’t usually want the stuff in the trash cans, considering mould wasn’t always obvious at first glance, but certainly would be once it got in your belly.

“It’s a privilege you only get if you work hard for it,” Chirrut answered.

Placing the carton on the plane over his hut, Baze pulled off the green leaves and put one strawberry back in Chirrut’s hand before he picked up one for himself.

“I was in the ruins to the west this morning, that’s probably why you missed me,” Baze said and popped the strawberry in his mouth. It was cold and a little too ripe, the juice perfectly sweet.

“The Sky Temple of the Guardians of the Whills? What draws you to that place?”

Chirrut took a bite off his strawberry. A drop of juice spilled over the corner over his lower lip and he sucked it into his mouth for a moment.

“It’s quiet,” Baze said, with a shrug. It was way more complicated than that, but even if he had known how to put it in words, he wouldn’t have wanted to.

“The dead usually are,” Chirrut said, thoughtfully. “You know, the Guardians were the first to believe in the will of the Force. Many of the details of their religion have been lost to the ages, though.”

“Someone had to be the first fool,” Baze muttered, leaning against the cool concrete wall as he picked out another strawberry. “Do you know why they called it the Sky Temple?”

As if he could see it, Chirrut raised his gaze up towards the sky above them. The grey clouds looked so heavy with rain they seemed to hang low, close enough to touch if you stretched out your hand.

“The Guardians said they had been visited by people from other galaxies,” Chirrut explained.

“Aliens? Are you serious?”

Baze raised a brow at him. There was a smile on Chirrut’s lips that made Baze think he’d reveal he’d been testing how much bull he could get away with – that seemed like the guy’s sense of humour –, but it dissipated into a much softer one.

“It’s not so crazy to think we’re not the only planet with life, is it? Although if it is true, I wonder why they stopped talking to us.” Listlessly, he rubbed his fingertips together to get the wet, red strawberry residue off. “Either way, that is why some of their statues and reliefs look so odd. They proclaimed to be friends with these aliens and were even said to have had some amongst their ranks. Of course, it’s hard to say now. Their legends are manifold and contradicting – and, as you noticed, hard to believe.”

“You know a lot about this.”

Chirrut had moved a little further into the alleyway to be protected from the wind. He leaned on his staff with both hands, so Baze had to tap his fingers to give him another strawberry.

“I used to be an Ashla monk,” Chirrut said, taking the strawberry from him. “We had a library full of books about the history of the belief in the Force.”

His hand frozen halfway on the way to his mouth, Baze stared at Chirrut for long enough that he had to be grateful that Chirrut couldn’t see him do it. A monastery was really not something he’d guessed to be part of this smart-mouthed man’s past. You expected monks to be much more serene.

“What made you stop being a monk?”

Chirrut chuckled.

“I didn’t, I think, not in my heart. I lost my sight to an illness eight years ago. It would have been easier to stay in the monastery. My brothers protected me – they meant well, they were very good to me. But I already had one sense less to observe the world and behind thick walls, with people leading me everywhere, I knew even less of it. I didn’t want my head to become my prison.”

While eating, Baze listened to Chirrut, who was looking at the red brick wall opposite them as if he was seeing something much more interesting. In his jeans and thick sweater, with a giant scarf that looked handmade, it was difficult to imagine him praying in a temple clothed in robes. However, Baze had seen him in front of the class and the focus and calm strength of his movements admittedly had something in them that suggested a clearer mind than most.

Baze felt a pang of jealousy. Though he was aware he was comparing apples to oranges, he wished his own reaction to adversity had been so productive.

“What about you, Baze? You seem to have lost something as well.”

His first instinct was to tell Chirrut it wasn’t his business, or that he was wrong. As he opened his mouth, though, Baze realised that he didn’t actually feel any resistance to the idea that the man might know a bit more about him in his heart. Chirrut didn’t seem to judge him for living outside his house, so there was no reason to believe he’d change his tune if Baze told him why he was there.

That didn’t mean he knew how to answer that question, though. He’d lost everything, including most of his mind, or that was what it felt like some days.

“I was a soldier for most of my life. Fought in a few wars – at first out on the borders of Hoth in the north, but I was stationed in Tatooine for most of my time in the military,” he said, well aware his barebones CV was not what Chirrut had been looking fort. “Hurt my knee.”

“That is why you left?”

Chirrut didn’t sound like he expected it to be the end of the story, merely like he was politely prompting him.

“I just barely didn’t pass the medical test,” Baze admitted, after a moment of hesitation. “If I’d tried a little harder, I could have talked the doctor into letting me continue.” However, by that point he’d lost the drive to do that; he’d lost his drive to do anything but barely hold on. “I don’t know,” he said, simply.

“You hurt more than your knee.”

Baze nodded his head, then remember Chirrut couldn’t see it. “I guess so.”

That was more than he’d admitted during the mandatory psychological exams. More than he’d admitted to himself for a long time. He crossed his arms tightly over his chest.

“I’m sorry to hear that, but I am happy you’re still here.”

“Here?”

“Alive,” Chirrut clarified. “You were a soldier, I’m sure you had many opportunities to die.”

“I’m not much use to anyone now.”

It felt as if he might as well be dead some days. He had no impact on the world and no one needed him. As someone who’d entered the service bright-eyed and bushy-tailed with ideas of protecting people, that stung, even after his benign ideals had been curbstomped by reality. A little something of them would always remain. It was part of who he was, the oldest lines carved into his soul.

“To yourself you are, which is usually enough,” Chirrut said with conviction. “And for what it’s worth, _I_ enjoy your company.”

Wordlessly, Baze regarded him from the side, trying to ignore the way his heart had seized up. It was pitiful that the idea alone that someone might want to spend time with him was special.

Chirrut rearranged the abnormally long scarf that coiled around his neck and nodded his head to himself.

“I have a class soon. I should get going.”

“Sure,” Baze said. “Talk to you later.”

“Yes,” Chirrut agreed.

-

“Chirrut, you got a moment?”

Only after Baze had called Chirrut’s name did he notice the young woman. She had bowed into the backseat of the sleek red sports car Chirrut was standing next to, fussing with something out of Baze’s view. When she spotted Baze, she needed a second to wipe the look of curiosity off her face.

“Baze – of course,” Chirrut said without turning around. “Just give me a minute.”

“That’s fine, I just dropped by to ask,” the woman said quickly, straightening and wiping thin blonde hair out of her face. “So it’s okay if I come Thursday instead, just for next week? My babysitter isn’t going to be able to make it on Sunday, she has exams.”

“Not a problem,” Chirrut said, smiling.

“That’s great of you – thanks a bunch! I’ll see you.”

After she had climbed into her car and pulled away from the curb, Chirrut lifted his head with that look of concentration Baze was used to by now, the one that meant he was intently listening to his surroundings.

“Here,” Baze said, automatically.

“Hello.”

“Didn’t mean to keep you from your customers,” Baze told Chirrut as he walked up to him.

Chirrut stopped as a wide forward motion of his stick hit the tip of Baze’s boots. They hadn’t spoken much in the last few days, but by now Baze was used to the fact that Chirrut was always busiest Friday to Sunday, when people actually had time and energy left for exercise.

“It’s fine. What is it?”

Baze weighed his words, wondering how much he really wanted to worry Chirrut over something that could just be his own paranoia. He wasn’t completely out of it yet, though, and he thought he had a pretty good sense for problems on the horizon still.

“Nothing for now, I think. I just noticed a few punks creeping around your building lately, mostly at night. Always the same group, about half a dozen young men.” Baze was about to point down the street when he realised that that wouldn’t really help Chirrut. “Mostly they’re hanging out by the corner in front of the bar, smoking and drinking. I thought they were just customers, but they drop by here a little too much.”

Though Chirrut’s brows drew together, Baze thought that he didn’t look quite as surprised as he probably should have.

“That’s unfortunate,” he said, simply.

“Are you in trouble?” Baze guessed.

Chirrut folded both hands over the tip of his staff.

“I don’t have debts or anything quite so interesting. It’s just a difficult neighbourhood sometimes. Thank you for telling me.”

Considering he wasn’t a complete moron, Baze could sense there was a bit more to it, but he left it at that after a moment of hesitation. So far, he hadn’t exactly been forthcoming with information himself, he couldn’t demand it of Chirrut.

“They didn’t approach you, did they?” Chirrut asked, his staff barely touching the sidewalk as he turned towards his studio.

“No, people generally don’t without a reason. I don’t look like it’s a good idea.”

“Are you very imposing?” Chirrut asked, almost teasing. “Sometimes I do miss knowing what people look like. Maybe I should have been afraid of you all this time?”

Baze smiled briefly.

“I’m tall and I got quite a bit of muscle left over from my time in the army. Most kids want an easier target.” He felt inclined to play into him. “What else do you want to know?”

Chirrut tilted his head with a bemused smile. “Would you give me your hand?”

Baze did and as Chirrut took it in his own, he realised that, aside from a few brawls he’d gotten into right after landing on the streets, when his resignation had still been laced with directionless fury, this was the first time another human being had touched him for any length of time in nearly two years. Chirrut held his hand, his thumb brushing along his palm, his fingers over his knuckles.

“I think I can imagine what you look like a little better now,” he said, after a few seconds, as he let go.

“How so?”

“Your skin is calloused and your nails are blunt and broken. Usually, those kind of hands only belong to an equivalent body.”

“I look rough. I’m a bum,” Baze said, snorting. “I’m sure you could have guessed that.”

“But I wouldn’t have known about the scars on the back of your hand,” Chirrut answered. “A knife?”

“Combat dagger,” Baze admitted. “You aren’t bad at this.”

“It’s the only way I see people now. I can’t ask to feel everyone’s face, so I try to find out as much as I can in a handshake. It doesn’t matter, of course, what someone looks like, but curiosity is one of my worse traits,” Chirrut mused, standing still in front of the glass doors to the studio. His hand was on the handle, but he hesitated, looking at some point a few inches next to Baze’s head. “I also noticed your hand is very cold. Winter is coming fast. I think I understand by now you don’t like people meddling in your business. Still, are you sure you’re not going to be too cold?”

Baze felt annoyance flaring up, but then his common sense reminded him of one uncomfortable fact: Chirrut kind of had a right to ask now. They had talked too much for him to pretend that he didn’t care whether Baze was freezing outside; really, it would have been odd for him not to worry whether a man he’d known for weeks might die on his doorstep. His irritation shifted towards anger as Baze became aware in a flash that he had done exactly what he’d tried to avoid for so long – he’d made someone responsible for his own broken life, even if just in the smallest way.

“I’m fine,” he said. “I survived last winter and I didn’t have any roof over my head back then. This time, it will be easier.”

“If you say so. If you ever get too cold, though, my apartment is right here. You can just ring the bell.”

“Yeah,” Baze said and bit his tongue. “I’ll let you get back to work.”

-

That night, the stars were hidden behind fat clouds and Baze listened to the rain on the plane over his bed. The drops sounded like fingers drumming and pooled in small puddles, weighing the plastic down. After he had covered the ground of his hut with every bit of foil he’d been able to find, the wet didn’t reach him so easily, but the cold crawled under his clothes with a thousand icy tendrils.

Survival had not been much of an issue last winter. He hadn’t welcomed death, but his life hadn’t seemed to have much of a point, either, so while he didn’t want to die, he had also not feared closing his eyes and freezing in his sleep. Then, the only person he should have pitied was the poor fool who’d stumble over his corpse and had to call the cops. There was Chirrut now, though, barely a hundred steps away, who would take him in if need be and, should he find Baze dead, would probably blame himself that he had not talked him into coming inside in the first place.

As he stared up through the milky plastic, the puddles making the darkness shiver, he considered the feeling. He was still furious with himself because he had let it get even this far; but as he thought about Chirrut’s hand holding his, warm and firm, he was a bit grateful to know that if he died someone would remember him for a little while.


	4. Chapter 4

Over the next week, the nights grew longer and colder, the days shorter and bleaker, and Baze tried to spend as much of his time on his feet as possible. It was a simple fact that something that moved could not be as easily frozen to the spot. During his walks he explored the districts as thoroughly as if he were planning to make a map, wandering the cramped, overflowing streets of downtown Jedha, past market stalls and brightly lit storefronts where he got lost in the crowd, or explored the business district bustling with people in suits who looked through him. Sometimes, he followed the highways through the old city gates and walked past the samey concrete buildings that nestled against the outsides of the great walls of Jedha City. These quarters seemed so desolate and lost in the mist-hung mornings and dim afternoons he wondered if living there would have felt like a big step up from the streets to him.

In the end, he usually found that all his ways would lead him back to the Sky Temple where he climbed the ruins looking for stone aliens.

He had just returned from this day’s journey and was busy stacking the dinted tin cans of pea soup he had found in his small hut when the soft murmur of some conversation from the main street exploded into laughter and a volley of shouts. He guessed that it were young men speaking, full of bluster, falling over each other to get a word in.

Baze had just filed it away as something to ignore when suddenly, Chirrut’s voice popped up among them.

“I’m not going to repeat myself again. You should leave. This is my property,” he said firmly.

Another gust of laughter.

“What’re you gonna do about it, huh?”

The tone made Baze’s muscles tighten, made him feel like he needed to bare his teeth like a dog. He’d heard it a thousand times out of a thousand mouths, the gleeful threat behind it, someone gagging for a fight. Pushing aside the old curtain that was his door, he got to his feet and peered around the corner.

A group of young men had crowded Chirrut against the wall of the studio building, thirty feet down the road under the harsh white light of a street lamp. He was holding his staff close to his chest with both hands like it could shield him. From where Baze stood, the look on his face seemed wary but not frightened, although Baze thought he really goddamn should be.

“Give him a break, the guy’s blind. Maybe he doesn’t know how stupid he sounds. Hey, asshole, there’s five of us and one of you!”

A short, stocky man in a leather jacket grabbed Chirrut’s staff with one hand, trying to tear it away with a sharp tug, but he had underestimated Chirrut’s strength. Baze could feel the shift in the atmosphere like a sudden temperature drop before a storm when Chirrut knocked his hand away with a chop coming down on his wrist.

Two men lunged for Chirrut. The same moment Baze sprang forward and sprinted towards them, Chirrut tore around the wooden stick he used as a cane and let it connect with one man’s chest, pushed him back and threw himself into the breach of bodies he’d created, escaping. He rolled off his shoulder and came back to his feet, already swiping his staff around once more.

It was an impressive display for someone who could not see, but he had started out of a bad position. One man got his arms around his neck from behind. Chirrut aimed his staff back over his shoulder and Baze saw he had the perfect angle to knock his teeth out if he pushed it up into his face. But though the stick twitched towards his attacker’s head, Chirrut suddenly halted in the movement. The pause was enough for the man to shove him sideways, make him stumble – and Chirrut couldn’t even see the flash of the knife another man pulled before it had already sunk deep into his arm.

Baze felt hot rage burst inside him like a grenade when Chirrut screamed. With a wordless growl, he threw himself on the man with the knife from behind and disarmed him in a flash. The protocol movements were still in him like instinct, like nature. The fumbling thug was empty-handed before he knew it and Baze threw the knife as far as he could and bashed the man’s head into the wall.

The surprised cries of his attackers had halted Chirrut in his tracks and Baze saw him lift his head, listening like a confused animal. “It’s me!” he shouted, knowing he would recognise his voice. With one hand, he pushed Chirrut backwards as he went for the jugular of the man closest to him, throwing him to the ground with the force of his weight and then kicking him in the stomach, the tip of his boot aimed for the soft spot just under the sternum.

The punks obviously hadn’t expected two adversaries, and no one who could actually see them. Trying to get their bearings, and a couple of them already on the ground, none even thought of taking Chirrut hostage. Amateurs, Baze concluded. Good for Chirrut and him, though. He swung and landed his fist in the next man’s face. When he saw the blood exploding from his lip, he realised that this was still so good, so much better than it should be. This was the part he had never gotten tired or frightened of, where he could do something, push back. There was someone awkwardly kicking at him. He slammed him to the ground like a sack of rice; he felt no pain, only the blood rushing in his ears.

They fled, as expected, and Baze wanted to go after them like a wolf after limping prey. However, before he could move, there was Chirrut’s voice again.

“Baze, what is happening?!”

Breathing hard, Baze turned around to look at him. Chirrut had to have come from inside to confront them because he wasn’t wearing a jacket, just his long, lumpy scarf over a pullover. The left sleeve was completely drenched in blood and hanging in shreds to his elbow.

The sight worked much like a bucket full of cold water on Baze. Counting to five in his head, he uncurled his fists and stepped closer.

“They’re running,” he said, as he pulled aside the pieces of frayed fabric to look at the wound. He saw raw flesh, a cut as long as his hand. Blood was welling, filling the wound like an overflowing river would its bed.

“The Force seems to keep you close whenever I need your help. Thank you,” Chirrut said.

“Whenever you say ‘the Force’, do you really just mean my hut?” Baze muttered, turning his arm a little. “You definitely need stitches. Give me your scarf.”

There had been a slight shake to Chirrut’s voice that told Baze shock was trying to settle in, but Chirrut only stood still and silent for a long moment, holding his stick tight enough for the skin over his knuckles to turn white. Then he handed the staff to Baze and, one-handed, unwrapped the too-long scarf, obediently holding out his bleeding arm as Baze tightened the scarf around his biceps.

“Bodhi made that for me. I hope the blood can be washed out.”

“You’ve got other problems,” Baze reminded him, not unkindly. It wasn’t uncommon for people to jumble priorities after getting this hurt. He’d been there.

While he applied his makeshift bandage, Baze was already considering where to take him. The closest hospital had to be Scyva’s Sacred Heart Medical Centre, but that was a way off. They would need fifteen, maybe twenty minutes to get an ambulance here, plenty of time for Chirrut to lose more blood than he had to. During his walks, Baze had gotten to know the streets very well and remembered two clinics in the neighbourhood that should be open at this time. They could get there faster.

“You’re a hell of a fighter for a blind monk,” he said, to distract him and because he meant it, as he took him by the wrist.

“I do teach tai chi, one would hope something sticks. Although I don’t usually have to practice my skills on true opponents.” When Baze began their way down the street, Chirrut simply followed without resistance. “Where are we going?”

“There is a clinic across from the old playground by the supermarket, they’ll be able to stitch you up. Can you make it there?”

“Yes, I think so. Are you okay?”

“Just a few bruises.”

By the time they’d reached the first street corner, Baze realised he was still holding Chirrut’s arm and quickly let go off him. He didn’t want to make Chirrut feel like he was a child that needed to be led around by the hand, but that courtesy had been wiped away by his heart hammering in his chest, the way red still filled his field of vision like a haze of blood when he saw Chirrut’s arm.

He’d bent himself out of shape so much about how unfortunate it was that he might have made Chirrut worry about him that he’d not even realised how much he had come to care for Chirrut.

“Who were these people? Are they going to be back?” Baze asked.

“Usually,” Chirrut said, resigned. “They are from the First Order.”

“Should’ve known,” Baze muttered. Damn fascist pieces of shit seemed to be involved in most of the crime in the city in some way. He remembered the bruises he’d seen on Chirrut before. “Do they have a special problem with you?”

“Apparently when I bought this studio a couple of years ago, I beat out one of their people for a club house of sorts. I know they have another now, but that doesn’t stop them from dropping by every once in a while. At least this time, they didn’t harass any customers.” He frowned. “If you happen to talk to Kay or his friends, don’t mention it to them. They would get in trouble on my behalf, but I don’t want them to.”

“Sure,” Baze said with a nod. Not wanting to make your problems those of innocent bystanders, he could relate to that.

When he changed directions around another street corner, he briefly took hold of Chirrut’s shoulder so he would follow him. They were walking straight into a biting wind. While they trudged on with their heads bowed, Baze called the fight to mind again.

“You could have taken that shot,” he said, suddenly.

“What shot?”

“When that one guy had you from behind. You were about to raise your staff, but you didn’t. You had a good angle.”

“Ah – yes. I know,” Chirrut said.

Baze looked at him over his shoulder. The wind kept blowing his long hair into his face, making it hard to see.

“Why didn’t you?”

“I could have hit him in the eye, or his mouth could have been open. Either way I could have caused serious harm. I may have even killed him if he’d turned his head just right.”

That Chirrut had been trying to keep the injuries minimal changed things, of course. Fighting blind was a few notched up the difficulty curve already, doing it while trying not to break anyone’s bones was approaching impossibility. He might as well have had both hands tied behind his back.

Baze sure hadn’t worried about whether these punks would get off easy.

“That’d just be bad luck for him,” Baze muttered. “He shouldn’t have messed with you.”

“But for me, too. I don’t want to kill anyone and I don’t need trouble with the police, either. I can’t risk everything I’ve built up for these thugs.”

The implication was clear. If Chirrut had to take a beating for the privilege of the continued existence of his business every once in a while, then that was just the way things were at the moment. Gods knew if you called the police, you had a fifty-fifty chance of getting an officer who was a First Order sympathiser these days. Besides, gang crime could be hard to pin down, even for well-meaning cops. By the time they had something useful, the First Order may have already struck again, and harder.

So Baze got it. He didn’t like it at all, but he got it.

The clinic was at the end of the street huddled under a tree. The tree’s naked branches shook so violently in the wind it seemed to be shivering. They entered a brightly lit hall smelling of disinfectant, white from floor to cabinets with a few empty cream-coloured chairs standing against the walls.

The blood had had ample time to trickle through Chirrut’s scarf by that point, which meant the receptionist was on her way to get them a doctor practically the moment they’d stepped inside. While they waited, Chirrut fumbled with his wallet, managing to pick out his insurance card. The receptionist took it from him after she had returned accompanied by a short woman in a long white lab coat.

“Well, hello. What happened here?” the doctor asked, looking between them with her hands buried in her pockets.

“Chirrut Îmwe,” Chirrut introduced himself. “Someone attacked me with a knife.”

“The cut is at least an inch or two deep and pretty long,” Baze supplied. “We walked here, he lost a fair bit of blood.”

Not that it needed to be pointed out. He was no medical professional, but Chirrut’s face was white as chalk by this point.

“Okay, we’ll take care of that. Is the police informed?”

“We’ll go after this,” Chirrut said. Baze guessed it was a lie, but it sounded honest enough to calm the doctor’s mind. She glanced at Baze.

“You are… ?”

“Baze Malbus,” Baze said.

“He’s my friend,” Chirrut added.

“Then you can come in, too, Mr. Malbus, if you’d prefer that, Mr. Îmwe?”

“Do you have time, Baze?”

“Of course,” Baze said, impatiently. It seemed stupid to him that Chirrut would think that he might leave him alone. He’d lost a ton of blood and the doctor was already asking her assistant to get her an anaesthetic. How would Chirrut get home without help?

When Chirrut sat down on the triage bench in the small exam room, Baze took his staff and retreated into the corner with it while Chirrut pulled off his pullover. Baze supposed he had come out of the studio to deal with the thugs before they threw a stone through his window or something. The fool should have just stayed inside and locked the door – but then again, Baze couldn’t pretend like he himself would have, either, had he been in Chirrut’s shoes.

Baze’s gaze wandered over Chirrut’s shirtless body when he laid down, scanning it for more faded bruises, but there were none – only the gaping gash in his biceps. While the doctor cleaned and disinfected the wound, Baze stood like a silent shadow. Chirrut’s hand was balled to a fist as the doctor started pulling the flesh back together with her needle and once more, Baze imagined leaping after those thugs, taking one guy’s, any guy’s head and mashing his face against the pavement until he saw blood and broken teeth on the ground.

By the time the doctor was done, Chirrut’s fingers had uncurled just a bit. The drugs were kicking in, Baze guessed.

“You are done, Mr. Îmwe, but I suggest you stay here for a bit. You may feel dizzy or numb. When you go, tell the receptionist, she will have your prescription for the Vicodin. If the police needs information on the wound we treated, they can call us and we will prepare a report.”

“Thank you for your help,” Chirrut said, the edges of his words bleeding into each other just a little.

With the doctor gone, Chirrut stared unseeing at the ceiling. Baze thought that he was just too high to really think clearly right now, and not too unhappy for it, since it’d mean Chirrut wasn’t hurting anymore. However, just then Chirrut carefully touched the stitches and tilted his head, listening for something.

“I almost thought you’d left, Baze.”

“I told you I wouldn’t.”

“Yes, you did. It’s very kind of you.” He moved his head slowly towards him. “Is there anywhere for you to sit down? I might take a moment to get up.”

“No kidding.” Chirrut looked pretty done for, which was no surprise. “There’s just your bed.”

Chirrut edged closer to the wall. His expression was like a summon and Baze huffed. After a moment of being stared at without being seen, he did as we was wordlessly being told. When Chirrut moved his arm out of the way for Baze to get comfortable, his fingers brushed against Baze’s strands. He halted.

“I didn’t imagine you with long hair,” he said.

“My hand didn’t tell you that?” Baze asked dryly.

Chirrut chuckled.

“It’s not the most exact science. I do miss seeing faces.”

It seemed a much more intimate revelation, somehow, than his idle talk about how he liked to be nosy and figure out what people looked like. Perhaps it was the drug lowering the walls that, at first glance, someone so open shouldn’t even have. But of course, everyone had some things they stuffed in boxes and kept from prying eyes, didn’t they?

Baze looked down at him. He was so odd; someone who couldn’t have trouble making people like him, yet poured effort into befriending a distant, ungrateful homeless man, a blind man unafraid to pick a fight with a gang, a monk who had intentionally fallen from grace. In the time Baze had known him, he had never seemed unsure of all his strange decisions or unhappy with his fate. Something in him hurt for Chirrut now as he heard him waver.

“You could touch my face, if that helps,” Baze offered, impulsively.

A slow smile spread on Chirrut’s lips.

“You don’t have to let me do that.”

“I don’t care,” Baze said, then amended, “I don’t mind.”

Carefully, Chirrut stretched out his good arm and Baze leaned back, taking his wrist and leading his hand towards his face. Chirrut’s fingertips explored it very thoroughly, making Baze aware in their journey of the lines that had etched themselves into his skin over the years, the big, ugly scar next to his eye, his ears, which stuck out too much, the flat ridge of his nose with the small bump – once broken –, the scruff of his short beard which was flecked with grey even though he wasn’t forty yet. Chirrut wouldn’t feel the color, at least.

“Thank you,” Chirrut said, lowering his hand.

“What’s your verdict?”

“I always thought beards are quite attractive. You have my approval,” Chirrut joked.

Baze snorted, bemused.

“There’s another scar, though. You have so many.”

“You’ve noticed two so far,” Baze said. Not exactly a multitude, although there were quite a few still hiding under his clothes.

“I’ve noticed more than those,” Chirrut answered sternly.

Shifting on his seat at the edge of the bed, Baze couldn’t refute him. Maybe he’d shown him more, yes. Other scars.

After a long moment of silence, Chirrut raised his good hand again, rubbing at his own face.

“Can you bring me home?”

Baze frowned.

“Can you walk a straight line yet?”

“Everything feels a bit muted, but I think I can get up,” Chirrut claimed.

“Maybe you should stay a bit longer. I don’t mind waiting.”

“I don’t like it here. If I’m not well and I don’t feel like I can rely on my remaining senses, I’d rather be somewhere I know. You said you’d help me,” Chirrut added easily. “I trust you won’t lead me astray.” 

If he put it like that, how could Baze refuse? No one trusted him to do anything these days, not even Baze himself, but Chirrut just smiled at him and held out his hand.


	5. Chapter 5

“Do you feel any better?”

Chirrut stopped, his keys still in hand, and turned around to Baze. It had taken a while to get used to how Chirrut would look sort of Baze’s way, but not really at his face, following only the sound of his voice to place him. Baze barely noticed it as odd by now.

“Much better. Yesterday, I’ve started teaching classes again.”

Since it sounded creepy, Baze didn’t say that he’d known that. When he’d noticed people moving behind the lit window that went out to the alley, he’d habitually checked for Chirrut at the front of the class and had seen that he had indeed replaced his substitute once more.

“That’s early,” he noted, knowing he didn’t have a say in it, yet unable to stop himself.

“I don’t like to rest. One gets idle,” Chirrut said, smiling. He was playing with the keys, which made small metallic sounds clinking together. “Since you’re here, I have a question, Baze. I would like to invite you out for dinner tonight. Would you come?”

“Is this for last Tuesday? I don’t need a reward for being a half-decent person,” Baze said. Not again.

“Starting a fight with a gang and spending an evening in the clinic to entertain a friend? That would deserve gratitude, at least,” Chirrut said. “But that’s not what this is about. I wanted to invite you out on a date, actually.”

The matter-of-fact way in which Chirrut spoke had Baze staring at him like an idiot, unable to process what he’d said.

“Are you joking?”

“No.”

Baze tried to reset and consider the question from a point of view where he was still a sergeant in the army and everything that had driven him out onto the streets was still bottled up inside of him where no one could see it. Back then, he might have believed that someone like Chirrut, or anyone, would ask him out. Still, circumstances were not so easily erased, where they? Baze wasn’t just some random acquaintance, he slept in his hut on Chirrut’s property, for the gods’ sake.

On the other hand, Chirrut had always done well at completely ignoring that.

He must have fallen quiet for a solid ten seconds there and Baze realised Chirrut deserved an answer either which way. So what if he discounted his situation as Chirrut apparently did? In the past, would he have said yes? Chirrut was a bit of a weirdo, but in a way Baze found easy to handle and like, he was smart, and of course he was handsome. Would he have gone out with him?

“Yes,” Baze said, slowly.

Chirrut’s smile grew wider. “I’m glad to hear it. I will pick you up after my last class.”

“I’ll be sure to dress in my best suit, if I find one in the meantime,” Baze muttered, somewhere on the verge between embarrassed and perplexed still.

“That’s nice, but I’m blind, I won’t notice.”

With an impish smile, Chirrut unlocked the door and vanished inside.

-

Even while telling himself he was a fool for doing so, Baze prepared for the date. He went down to the river a second time that day, washed himself and his hair in the ice-cold water and brushed his teeth with his finger. When the sun set, he picked out the cleaner one of his two pairs of pants and a shirt that looked and smelled like it belonged to someone who had actually been confronted with a washing machine at some point during the last year.

Of course, he still had no idea where this was supposed to go. He remembered the looks from Chirrut’s young friends and he knew that if they heard about this, they’d immediately assume he was looking for a meal ticket. Besides, while this might all seem like an adventure to Chirrut now, no one seriously dated a man sleeping in an alley next to their business.

However, whenever he considered blowing him off during that afternoon, his thoughts wandered back to the feeling of Chirrut’s fingers on his face, warm and gentle, and the way he had followed without question when Baze had dragged him by the hand to the clinic, and the words ‘he’s my friend,’ which he’d spoken without the fear of rejection that would have left them stuck in Baze’s throat. Whatever other people might think of him for this, Baze had his own reasons to meet Chirrut that evening.

His stomach tight like he was seventeen waiting for his prom date again, Baze watched the studio window out of the corner of his eyes. Chirrut left his field of view after the last of the students had gone and he had put the wooden sticks they had used today back into a neat pile by the wall. Fifteen minutes later, he re-emerged in the entrance to the alley. His black tai chi uniform had been swapped for his long dark mantle, open over a slim-cut white button-up and jeans that hugged tightly to his muscular legs.

“You look good,” Baze said.

Chirrut cocked his head.

“Great. A few months ago, I asked Cassian to pick out some clothes I can wear if I ever want to look presentable – you met him, I think? He doesn’t _usually_ take advantage of my blindness. Kay only gave it a ten percent chance that he’d put something pink in there. Of course, Kay wouldn’t tell me if Cassian had, either.”

Baze had to smile.

“I’m sure you look handsome, too,” Chirrut added.

“I still have the beard, if that helps.”

“It does.”

When Baze had walked to his side, Chirrut turned, swiping his stick over the ground to orient himself. Their shoulders touched briefly.

“This way,” he decided as he started walking. “The place is not far and the food is good. Jyn showed it to me.”

“I’ll trust you. Haven’t been in a restaurant here in a long time.”

“Are you from Jedha?”

“Yeah. Don’t have any family left here, though. What about you?”

Sometimes, Baze thought about retracing the steps to his childhood home, but that was a dare he hadn’t yet fulfilled for himself. He didn’t know what had happened to the graves of his parents, either; he’d been stationed away for too long to keep an eye on proceedings and then had felt too guilty to ask. Someone else was probably buried on top of them now.

“The monastery I lived in was a couple towns over. I do still visit them sometimes.”

“You didn’t grow up there, though, did you?”

“Yes, actually. I was left before the doors of the shrine as a newborn.”

Baze had to bite back a barking laugh. It wasn’t funny, but who still put children on the steps of a temple?

“That’s – medieval.”

Chirrut nodded his head. “Indeed. But my brothers took it as a sign of the Force and actually started legal proceedings to adopt me. Since no one ever came to reclaim me, that’s where I stayed. They home-schooled me there, too.”

“Were there other kids?”

“Younger initiates, but these days, they don’t take in underage people. Even I only officially took the habit when I was eighteen.”

So that was how Chirrut had become a monk, then. Baze guessed it was pretty inevitable if that was all you saw growing up. He couldn’t detect any bitterness about a lost childhood or family in Chirrut’s voice, though. In fact, the fond smile on his face made it quite obvious to Baze that it really had been a decision made for his self-sufficiency rather than against the monastery when he had left to find his own way.

The street was empty and quiet but for the sound of their footsteps and voices after they had turned into one of the winding byroads that Jedha had so many of. Breathing in the cool air, with Chirrut walking close beside him, Baze looked up at a night sky the dark blue of silk, diamond-studded, illuminated by a moon that was almost full.

“If you see a sign reading ‘Terma’s Cantina,’ stop there,” Chirrut said.

He could see the sign down the road and Baze almost wished it hadn’t been there. This was as peaceful as his nights on the ruins, only he wasn’t alone this time and he didn’t mind the company. Still, he had an excuse to touch Chirrut’s back to stop him when they passed.

“Here,” he said.

Inside, the canteen was crowded, smelling of cigarette smoke, alcohol and greasy food. People sat mostly clustered around tables, but Baze led the way towards one of the small booths in the back, thinking they’d have more privacy there. The fabric of the seats was threadbare and the cushion sank deep when he sat down, but though worn-out, it was still comfortable. A waitress chewing gum put down two menus in front of them. Chirrut didn’t touch his.

Looking around, Baze remembered that he used to like this kind of place. No overeager staff to bother you, no responsibility to interact with anyone but the people you had or hadn’t brought. Now, however, he felt like a peg in a square hole as he shifted on the bench. It was loud, and there were probably half a hundred people in this room. He wasn’t used to the numbers or the noise anymore, not in such a closed-up space. He also didn’t like that right behind his bench of the booth, the door to the kitchen opened and closed all the time as plates were carried in and out. He should have checked for that before he’d sat down because he felt stupid asking Chirrut to change seats now, even with some excuse about the draft. However, he could feel the movement of the air every time the door opened, forcing him to resist the urge to check that nothing dangerous was in his back. He couldn’t even be sure he wasn’t missing anything approaching because everyone was talking and laughing and shouting and making it impossible to pick out any one sound.

Baze shook his head. He wasn’t going to throw the towel because of a door in his back, or a couple of drunken frat boys at the table next to them. He was in a bar, not an active warzone, the most dangerous thing that could come out of that kitchen was something like spoiled milk. “You know the menu?” he asked Chirrut, to distract himself.

“Yes. Their fozbeer is quite good, if you drink. It’s from a local brewery in NiJedha. Otherwise, I like their chai tea.”

Baze thought that Chirrut had skirted the issue of whether he was an alcoholic, or at least a sober one, rather gracefully. He couldn’t blame him for assuming there might be problems, but Baze had never tended towards drugs. As far as he was concerned, being in his own head had been enough of an uncomfortable trip lately and he found the idea of adding more instability frightening.

“I’ll try the fozbeer-”

Baze interrupted himself because he jumped so hard he hit his knees at the low table, making his old injury ache. From behind him, he had heard noises like a quick succession of shots, or fragments of something a grenade had torn to pieces crackling against the walls.

“The hell was that?!”

Across the table, he could see a small line work itself between Chirrut’s eyebrows.

“They serve popcorn as a snack,” he said, slowly.

Baze knew he must’ve sounded panicked, but it was too late to pull back from that brink now. He could feel his shoulders were squared as if locked in position, his spine going rigid as his hand twitched for a gun he didn’t have anymore. It would have been easier without Chirrut – easier without the expectation for himself to act like a fucking person for one evening. He’d have run, but instead he clung to the menu, crinkling the pages. The sound of gunfire didn’t stop and the people around him seemed to become ever louder, even though, logically, Baze knew they didn’t. The noise began to drone out his own thoughts, the letters started dancing in front of his eyes. The door opened again, wind teasing his hair, and he breathed out hard.

Suddenly, Chirrut’s hand covered over his, the touch of his fingers light, a call for his attention.

“You don’t like it here, do you?”

“It’s – loud. Crowded,” Baze managed. He was barely in the present now; he could feel memories encroaching like walls closing in.

“You’re right. I didn’t expect there to be so many people. Let’s go.”

This time, it was Chirrut lead the way which he found with his staff, still holding his hand. When Chirrut strode forward, it was with more confidence than Baze felt seeing the damn room.

Once the door shut behind them and the cold night had them back, the noise receded to a buzzing hum scratching at his eardrums. Baze leaned against the wall and sucked in clean air for a moment. Chirrut stood silently beside him, their hands still linked. His palms had to be wet with sweat, Baze thought. As he looked at his date, the crushing realisation hit that he’d managed a normal human interaction for all of perhaps two minutes. Baze used to be a leader of a squadron, a fearless hitman, someone people hid behind when things got tough; a few moments locked in a building with a friendly crowd and a pan full of popcorn, that was all it took to break him now.

“I’m sorry,” he said, tiredly. He was, for the missed chance, for the fact that he’d probably ruined Chirrut’s evening. He was sorry for himself, too, because he’d looked forward to this even as he told himself not to hope. Hope never led anywhere useful.

“It’s fine. Let’s go home – I don’t have much food in my fridge, but I’m sure we’ll find something to eat.”

Again, Baze was reduced to staring at him. Chirrut’s erratic behaviour at least managed to pull him out of the swamp of the memories of his past, he could say that much for it.

“Alright?” Chirrut asked, after a long moment of silence.

“I thought the date was over.”

“If you want it to be, it can be.”

“No, I…”

It had come too quick not to betray that his heart still clung to this just a little bit. Chirrut smiled as he tugged at his hand.

“You don’t have to hold my hand,” Baze groused. Now that the fear retreated, shame found some space in his head again.

“But it’s a date. Besides, if I follow you, I don’t have to watch my step as much.”

Baze couldn’t really refute that. He didn’t want to do it enough to think hard about an argument, either.

-

Chirrut’s blue couch had about two dozen pillows on it and Baze had pushed them into heaps to make space to sit. His host returned from the kitchen holding a bag of chocolate-covered raisins, a plate of unevenly cut cheese cubes and a bowl of chips.

“I should have gone to the store today,” Chirrut concluded, as he placed everything on the couch table.

“Not your fault.”

Baze certainly didn’t blame Chirrut for not foreseeing that Baze wouldn’t even make it to ordering drinks.

“How do you feel?” Chirrut asked, reaching for the bottle of water and two glasses he had brought before.

“Fine,” Baze said evasively. He felt like he could breathe again, at least.

Chirrut filled the glasses by adjusting the bottle gently and curling the tip of his finger around the rim of the glass, stopping when he felt the water touch it. Baze watched the obviously practiced motion.

“Are you never afraid?” he asked, suddenly.

“Afraid? Of what?”

After he had closed the bottle, Chirrut leaned into one of the walls of pillows. He was looking at the carpet, but from the concentrated look on his face, Baze knew he was listening.

Baze never had the urge to talk about – this. He didn’t know how to describe it. Yeah, he knew the damn word, PTSD, he’d read the flyers before entering the army, but four letters just didn’t seem to encompass the way that it had crushed his whole life in its wake. However, Chirrut didn’t make him nervous, and he apparently had the same effect on him, which Baze still didn’t understand. If he’d have lost his sight in the war, he’d have eaten a gun. He couldn’t imagine how much the world would terrify him if he’d stood before it with his defences so drastically lowered.

“Anything. You’re blind, yet you confront thugs and invite strangers into your home – and it never seems to bother you that you can’t see.”

Chirrut smiled. “Of course it does.”

At this point, it felt like he was just saying it to make Baze feel better about his own breakdown. Baze grunted, clearly not convinced.

“I’m not afraid of strangers, or people who look to hurt me. The Force will protect me, but…”

Chirrut looked towards the ceiling, but pointed at the ragtag offerings on the table. He began again and Baze sensed in the hesitation of the careful way he chose his words that the next part didn’t come too easy to him.

“I don’t go shopping a lot because it’s one of the things I can’t do alone, and I won’t ever be able to do alone. Kay and his friends help me when they’re around, but otherwise I have to trouble one of the people who work at the shop and make them get me everything. Either way I’m a burden on someone and it won’t get better. When I get older, inevitably my hearing will be worse and my reflexes will lessen. People I care about may stay only because they pity me, not because I can give them anything in return.” He tilted his head. “I’m very afraid of that.”

As he looked at him in silence, Baze wondered if Chirrut had planned to tell him anything like that tonight and doubted it. No, this was different, this was Chirrut evening the playing field. He’d revealed a massive target for Chirrut to take aim at should he look to hurt Baze, but instead of taking advantage, Chirrut had shown him his own wound that Baze could put his fingers in if he chose to.

“I think as long as you can still talk, you’re good,” Baze said, finally. There’d be a reason for anyone with a brain to want to be around him.

“Really? Some say my mouth is the worst part of me,” Chirrut said, his voice lighter now. The soberness in his expression was replaced by another smile and Baze found himself mirroring it.

“They obviously haven’t taken a good look at it. It’s pretty enough.”

The comment slipped out without his permission, some echo of a former self, one not much more outgoing, but more driven and less self-conscious, easily giving a few brash comments to a willing man or woman he wanted to charm. It made Chirrut chuckle and Baze liked the sound. Chirrut placed his glass down.

“I think to make this a traditional first date, we should watch a movie,” he decided. “I have a few on the shelf to the left.”

-

Since he’d had enough excitement for tonight, Baze chose an animal documentary about tauntauns, some giant, furred, horse-like creatures which lived in the icy deserts around the poles. Chirrut had asked him to put on the audio description, which Baze did without question. Soon after the movie started, Baze realised that it was a second narrator describing the scenery and everything left unclear by the original voiceover to one who couldn’t see the picture on the screen. It probably explained why he had found such a jumble of genres on Chirrut’s shelf – the movies might have been chosen for how well they were made for him to access.

They ate cheese cubes and chocolate raisins and Baze helped Chirrut locate a chip he’d dropped onto the sofa, his hand pushing underneath Chirrut’s thigh to collect the pieces before they were ground to crumbs. By the time the documentary closed on a picture of a baby tauntaun prancing through the snow, Baze’s pulse was steady again.

“We should do this again sometime,” Chirrut said, a little later, as he opened the downstairs doors for Baze. “I won’t take you to anymore bars, I promise.”

“Don’t you think it’ll be boring, sitting in your own apartment with me?” Baze asked.

“I wasn’t bored tonight.”

Chirrut hesitated at the door and Baze had a feeling that he’d have liked to close it again with Baze inside. However, he didn’t want to make this strange, not more than he already had. A date was supposed to end and give the people a little space to think it over.

Baze stepped outside, the cold welcoming him with cruel, well-known fingers clawing at his skin. Before he walked off, however, he thought about Chirrut’s comment, about this being a traditional first date. Carefully, he took him by the shoulder, then leaned forward, motionless for a moment so his breath touched Chirrut’s face, took away the surprise, gave him a chance to step back. Chirrut didn’t, so he kissed him briefly on the lips. He really did have a pretty mouth, rather small, with an arch to his upper lips that made it a bit heart-shaped. The corners pulled upwards slightly in a smile. Baze was tempted to push in, but thought better of it. It was just the first date, after all.

“Night,” Baze said.

“May the Force of others keep you safe out there,” Chirrut answered.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry that there was no update last week, I was/am sick, so everything went a bit slow.

The last time Baze had had a girlfriend, he’d been eighteen and he’d broken it off to go to the army; the last time he’d had a boyfriend he had just returned from his final tour and not tried to find love so much as something ordinary to cling to only to realise he didn’t care enough to fight for it. The man had left him after two months when Baze had not managed to get a job, or keep his apartment clean, or remember things like when to pick him up at the train station. Between those two points had been quite a few flings, but no romantic relationships to learn from.

So was what they did normal? It sure felt that way, but that made it strange because Baze didn’t really understand how it could be with him living in a hut nestled against Chirrut’s house. He liked it, though, more than he cared to admit.

They watched Chirrut’s movies until Baze got so used to the even-voiced narrators that it always confused him for a second when he put on the news and didn’t hear anyone explain the pictures on the screen. They talked about Chirrut’s life in the monastery and after. Baze liked hearing about his training and all the ways in which he had driven the other monks insane as a wild little boy. He never said anything about the military and Chirrut never asked. Chirrut showed him a few tai chi stances when Baze complained that his back hurt one night. Baze helped Chirrut clean up the studio after one kid from the Under Ten group had spilled Gatorade all over the wooden floor. Baze wasn’t a great cook, but he remembered a couple of recipes and made pasta with fresh tomato sauce and pancakes and casserole for them. Chirrut would help him, laughing when Baze got nervous seeing him handle various much-too-sharp kitchen utensils.

“This is nice. I can’t cook,” Chirrut said, one evening, as they sat over their dinner.

“Because you’re blind?” Baze asked, through a mouthful of noodles.

“It makes it more difficult. Really, though, I just don’t put effort into learning it.” Chirrut smiled. “But the Force provides.”

Baze rolled his eyes.

One time, Chirrut fell asleep on his shoulder. Baze left him like that for an hour after the movie had ended.

He’d spent about a dozen evenings with him so far. It hadn’t gone further than petting on the couch. Baze didn’t much care. He had no expectations because he still felt like none of this should be happening – that at some point Chirrut would realise this wasn’t supposed to last. If they kissed, that was enough, if Chirrut placed playful pecks against his jawline, that was enough, and if Chirrut allowed Baze to let him map out his muscular back with one hand under his shirt, that was more than he’d actually thought would happen between them.

Still, though Chirrut never grabbed his hands to stop him and didn’t turn his head away from Baze’s kisses even if they got hungry, he wouldn’t move past Baze’s belt himself and Baze wanted to leave that step to him. Could be he was still celibate; or maybe he needed time to make himself vulnerable, being already at a disadvantage. Everyone had their hang-ups. As long as Chirrut didn’t cut their time short, Baze had a lot of it.

Another invitation that Baze always waited for, and that actually came frequently, was for Chirrut to ask him to come inside. For some reason, it would have felt like imposing if it came from him; not to Chirrut, but to himself. That was also why he left after every date. Little as they talked about it, he could feel that Chirrut disliked to let him go because, hell, he was a normal person. Baze would have hated it, too, leaving his boyfriend to sleep in the cold with First Order thugs sneaking about like alley cats and the temperatures dropping ever further. To Baze, however, the more time he spent with Chirrut, the more it felt like he had to prove to himself and to Chirrut that he could still survive without him – that he wasn’t a beggar who needed his help, but simply his partner.

That was the ideal, anyway. The breaking point came one Sunday evening. It had alternated between rain and snow all day, until what fell from the heavens was already wet sludge before it had even hit the ground. His hut had flooded in the afternoon. Baze felt like a sponge fat with ice water, like the thin mud had crept into his organs and left them frozen.

He had survived nights like this before, without help, but how could he not think about the open door that was only a few metres down the road? As he sat there, his fingers growing dirty and numb while he was trying to adjust the plastic planes on the ground, he longed for Chirrut’s warm body pressed against his as they lazed against his thousand pillows.

When the lightning started to look like explosions and the thunder rolled like cannon shots and the cough that had settled in his chest days ago was racking him every minute, Baze gave up. Pride and stupidity had many touching points, but if he got pneumonia because of his stubbornness when instead he could have listened to Chirrut mumble prayers under his breath while he fixed a microwave dinner for him, he would really have to count that as an undeclared suicide attempt.

Baze stumbled out of the alley, his bad knee stiff, and rang the doorbell to Chirrut’s apartment before wiping his dirty hands on his trousers.

“Yes?” Chirrut asked, through the intercom.

“It’s me, Baze,” he muttered.

“Downstairs is locked, give me a moment.”

After a short while of waiting while the rain pattered on his head, the front door opened and Chirrut emerged, wearing soft pants and a wide shirt with the logo of his studio on it, some sort of stylised bird made to look a bit like a circle. Seeing him made Baze realise that up to now, Chirrut had been dressing up for him when he came over, always wearing something that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in a middle-class restaurant. He wouldn’t have needed to go through the trouble; Baze thought domestic was a good look on him.

“Come in,” Chirrut said, holding the door open for him.

Baze did, dripping onto the floor like a wet dog.

“Can I stay with you for the night? The storm…”

“Of course.”

Chirrut closed in for a kiss, but pulled back after a peck when his naked forearm brushed Baze’s drenched pullover.

“You need a shower,” he decided.

“I just had one,” Baze gave back.

“A shower over freezing temperatures.”

One hand on the wall, Chirrut led the way upstairs.

“I’m going to get you something dry to wear,” he said, after he had closed the apartment door and locked up behind them, leaving the keys on the dresser where they joined another pair on a chain.

Baze knew the way to the bathroom by now; one of the comforts of dating Chirrut had been that he didn’t have to rely on the river as much to keep clean. Just as he had peeled off his own wet rags, Chirrut opened the door to place cloth pants and a black shirt on the washing machine. 

“Don’t worry, I won’t peek,” Chirrut said.

Baze snorted.

He stayed under the stream until his skin was red from the scalding water, then dried himself before pulling on the clothes picked out for him. Though Chirrut was hardly skinny with all his muscle, his clothes sat pretty tight on Baze. Being homeless had not left him gaunt; since he ate when he could, he weighed more than he had in the army. Most of his mass was still muscle, though, something he’d always easily kept. He looked at himself in the mirror, but the sight of the fairly nondescript clothes wasn’t as interesting to him as smelling Chirrut on himself.

When he returned to the living room, where he heard Chirrut, there was already tea and cake on the table, as well as a package of tissues and a brown bottle. Chirrut sat at the computer and over his shoulder, Baze saw a spreadsheets. A monotone, artificial voice fit awkwardly around numbers and words like ‘expenses’ and ‘earnings’. However, Chirrut cut her off mid-word as he noticed Baze’s footsteps.

“You’re sick,” he said, without the playful tone that he chose so often.

Considering he’d been coughing up a lung in the shower, Baze couldn’t blame him for noticing.

“I’m fine,” he grunted, “just a cold.”

“You should have come in earlier. Take a spoon of fennel honey. The tea is fresh ginger, it should help.”

Though it should have bothered him, Baze sat down and did what he was told. For all his reservations about weighing Chirrut down, there was something comforting about having someone fuss over him for a stupid, unnecessary reason. He would have survived a cold either way, especially now that he had a roof over his head, but here was someone who really wanted to make him feel better.

Chirrut sat down by his side.

“You’ll get sick, too, if you come too close,” Baze noted.

“I rarely do. I have a good immune system.”

By this point, Baze had long realised it was useless to argue with Chirrut unless you really had to. His head was hard as concrete and could go through most walls. Instead, Baze shrugged and put his hand on Chirrut’s thigh. He liked having a connection point.

“What are you doing?” Baze asked, glancing at the computer as he sipped the ginger tea, the pieces of cut root swaying at the bottom.

“Bookkeeping. It’s tedious with the voice over program – it would be tedious even if I could see –, but I can’t leave it all to Kay. I do have to pretend I’m the boss sometimes.”

“Go on,” Baze said. He hadn’t meant to interrupt Chirrut’s work.

“That’s fine, I wanted an excuse to stop. Bodhi brought cake, you should try it.”

He pointed at the slice on the table.

“Did you have something to celebrate?”

“My birthday,” he said.

Baffled, Baze looked at him. “When was that?”

“Yesterday.”

Yesterday they hadn’t even met up. Baze had been doing one of his usual routes to keep warm in the cold weather, walking all the way around the city walls.

“Why didn’t you say so?”

“We didn’t use to celebrate it in the monastery, so it’s not important to me. I forgot,” Chirrut said with a shrug. “Besides, it’s an approximate birthday – the day I was found at the temple. No one knows when I was born.”

“That’s good because I don’t have a gift for you.”

As if he could have gotten him something if he’d known, Baze thought to himself, the tea suddenly bitter on his tongue.

“Are you sure?”

With a smile on his lips, Chirrut leaned in and Baze pulled him in by the back of his head, placing the kiss he obviously wanted on his lips. His bad mood dissipated.

“So you’re cheap to shop for,” he muttered and bit Chirrut’s lower lip. Chirrut’s hand ran up his chest, settled it on his shoulder as he leaned into him and Baze took him in his arms.

It was slow and warm, Chirrut pressing up against him as they kissed, his fingers tangling in Baze’s wet hair. Chirrut tasted faintly like chocolate cake and Baze couldn’t keep himself from pushing a hand under his shirt, fingertips running along the ridges of his hard muscle. Slowly, he sank backwards against the pillows, pulling Chirrut on top as he nudged his head sideways and kissed his neck. There was a spot there just at Chirrut’s throat that always got him a pleased shiver. It did now, especially when he moved his hand down and followed the outline of his hipbone with his thumb.

“I should – probably have a look at something in the kitchen,” Chirrut said, as he pulled backwards, without much effort to make his excuse believable. He was half-smiling.

Without protest, Baze let him go. Though some lizard part of his brain was disappointed when Chirrut let their sessions peter out, he didn’t feel any need to push him.

“Too much?” he asked. This was the first time Chirrut had been so blunt. It couldn’t hurt to get some actual guidelines how far he was willing to go. Baze didn’t want to make him uncomfortable every time in some unnecessary game of trial and error.

Chirrut halted in his movement to get off Baze’s lap. “No.”

“No?”

Baze was just confused now, but Chirrut’s mind seemed to be working. He sat back, his hand smoothing over Baze’s chest.

“I know you have seen and experienced some things in the war I’ll never be able to imagine. I thought perhaps you didn’t like to be so intimate. I wanted to wait until you asked me,” Chirrut said. “And right now, you made it difficult for me to wait.”

The answer made Baze huff in surprise.

“I just thought you might still be chaste,” he answered.

After his own moment of puzzled silence, Chirrut laughed quietly.

“I was for a long time,” he conceded. “When I say I’m still a monk when it comes down to it, that is not one of the practices I have kept up, though.”

“Well, I might’ve come back from the war different, but I don’t have any problems with this.”

Cupping his face with both hands, Baze tugged Chirrut into a kiss. Good to know they’d begrudged themselves of something for no reason. Still, it didn’t matter much. He’d liked those quiet hours with Chirrut lying on the sofa and sharing kisses like teenagers. Sleeping with him was technically more intimate, but it had felt plenty close when Chirrut hugged him to himself, so much more than what Baze had had in years.

Chirrut was very handsy now, without restraints. Baze’s shirt went first, and he curiously explored his body, running fingers through the soft, dark hair on his chest, his mouth trailing his collar bone, his fingers lingering just for a moment on a thick, knotted scar. Baze allowed him some time before he pulled him close again, leaving them chest to chest. He tried not to look at the stitches on Chirrut’s arm.

Baze was still short of breath, so he didn’t feel like doing anything too involved tonight, and besides, Chirrut heat and weight on him like a blanket were exactly what he needed after freezing for a day. While they kissed, Baze pushed down the soft waistbands of their pants and took them both in hand.

Chirrut was not loud, he found, but the hitched noises he made were enough to get Baze’s blood pumping. His fingers wandered down from Baze’s head to pet and massage his neck, and he dragged his lips over Baze’s bearded chin with a little smile before he kissed him again.

They went from Baze stroking them to rutting against each other in short, ungraceful, perfectly satisfying motions. Chirrut was first over the edge when Baze sank his teeth into his shoulder. His muscles tightened, his face pressed into the crook of Baze’s neck. After he had calmed himself with a few deep breaths, he lifted his hips to reach between them and get a grip on Baze. His fingers moved slowly at first, tapped him with teasing strokes, until Baze made a gruff noise that had Chirrut chuckling. When he really tried, firm and quick, his tongue flicking against the shell of Baze’s ear, Baze came within a few strokes.

“I was right, you’re very handsome,” Chirrut said, resting against Baze’s chest while Baze ran his hand down Chirrut’s body, finally, shamelessly following the curve of his spine and the swell off his backside down to his thigh.

“You got me beat,” Baze said, good-naturedly.

“I see you can be charming after all,” Chirrut said, grinning as he lifted his head. “Let’s go to bed. It’s late.”

-

Though the mattress was much better on his back than uneven pavement, sleep did not come easily for Baze. He wasn’t used to being inside anymore when he closed his eyes, or, indeed in a real bed. It was also strange to hear someone else’s breath but his own and though Chirrut was lying dead asleep by his side, it put him a little on edge.

Instead of trying to ignore the sound, he concentrated on it, reminding himself that Chirrut was his safe haven at the moment. It was a little like the meditation he used to practice when he was very young and still a believer. His eyes drifted slowly shut.

It was in this uncertain state between consciousness and dream that something curled over his neck, put pressure on his throat. His pulse jumped up a hundred beats as he winced away, all survival instinct. He turned around on all fours, pushing his attacker off and pinning him by the shoulder, his fist raised to smash their teeth in.

“Baze?”

Tiredly, blind eyes blinked up at him. Baze stared down and, like punching his foot down on a gas pedal before he could barrel down the side of a cliff, he stopped, then rewound, forcing his mind to stay with reality. It dawned on him then that Chirrut had probably turned around in his sleep and ended up with his arm draped over Baze’s neck.

“I – didn’t mean to wake you,” Baze said, lamely.

When no further explanation came, Chirrut just nodded his head. He reached up slowly, directionless, meeting Baze’s arm which he caressed before his hand dropped back onto the blanket and he closed his eyes again, his whole body going slack. Now that he’d determined the hand on his shoulder belonged to Baze, he obviously felt safe to go back to sleep. Why wouldn’t he? It wasn’t like he had seen the fury in Baze’s eyes and the fist that had come this close to breaking his nose. He couldn’t. Chirrut was strong and in a fair fight Baze wasn’t sure he could have taken him. This wasn’t one.

Slowly, Baze pulled back, his heart hammering in his chest. He waited until Chirrut’s breath had evened out again before he got up

It was always like this. There were good moments, sometimes entire good days when he wondered what the hell he was doing on the streets, why he didn’t pick himself up and got a job on a construction site or something, tried to find a room to live in; and then he would see something out of the corner of his eyes, or hear a sharp sound, or see a face that seemed familiar even though it belonged to a dead person, or sometimes for no damn reason whatsoever, he’d tumble right back towards the abyss and he was again just holding on, back to keeping himself in a present that was at least not hell anymore.

Baze looked down at Chirrut’s sleeping figure. What was he doing here, exactly? What could he bring to Chirrut’s life but trouble, in the end? Chirrut didn’t deserve that.

With silent steps, Baze left the room. In the bathroom his clothes were dry and warm, hanging over the heater, and he swapped the ones Chirrut had lent him for his own, feeling them cool quickly against his skin. At the door, he took one of the two keys. He locked the door after himself and, after descending the stairs, did the same to the front door once he had stepped outside. He’d give the keys back tomorrow and then he’d start looking for another place to set up camp.


	7. Chapter 7

There was a thick blanket of clouds covering the sky, the icy rain still falling, so Baze couldn’t see the stars that the Guardians of the Whills had looked up to and fantasised about all those many years ago. Tucked in the shadow of the folded arms of a strange stone beast in priest’s robes, Baze found himself thinking once more about Chirrut’s words: about the alien visitors of the Guardians, but also about life at the monastery, and about his classes at the studio, and how he would like to ride a Tauntaun at some point. It seemed like every important and inconsequential thing Chirrut had ever said was still stuck in his head and now it ran on repeat.

It didn’t matter, though. It had all ended the only way it could have ended. Here he was, after all that, back with the ruins and seeing clearer with every minute that he should have known better, _had_ , in fact, known better and ambled on this dead-end path anyway. These cute little dates they had had, they were like dreams, chunks of time in which Baze could pretend to be normal, but that was all they had been – silly make-believe. All they had achieved, in the end, was to hurt them both.

He breathed out and looked towards a relief in a half-crumbled wall. It pictured priests kneeling down with bowls before a strange altar that looked like only a heap of jagged stone. He had to smile tightly at his own stupidity. How was he supposed to forget about his monk boyfriend in the remains of a temple? Maybe not his wisest decision, but then, he probably would be seeing him in every part of the city now. Considering how long it had taken Chirrut to socialise him enough for a date – like some sort of feral dog that was slowly lured in –, he couldn’t say he had fallen fast, but he’d certainly done so hard. It wasn’t a surprise there were all the appropriate feelings of dizziness and pain as he tried to get up.

Up here in the ruins, all Baze had been hearing so far were the noise of raindrops and the hum of the nightly city as a distant buzz. It wasn’t difficult, then, to pick out the sound of stones shifting, the click and clatter of small pebbles rolling down the fallen walls. With a frown, Baze got up. Even if it provided some protection from the rain, it was better not to sit under the stones if some parts of the ruins had come loose. It happened, especially on nights like this, when sharply falling temperatures and the rain were working on the ancient materials.

However, it wasn’t the stone alone making the noise. As he backed off from the statue, he saw a shadow of a figure standing on a toppled, rectangular pillar that had fallen on top of the roof of a collapsed shrine. As Baze narrowed his eyes, the lightning lit up the night once more, aiding the waning neon light of the few lamps erected around the ruins in some feeble attempt to keep out intruders. The figure, wearing an ankle-length mantle, was holding a long stick.

Baze cursed under his breath. How in the hell had the fool found him? And what was he thinking, clambering over wet, unstable stonework in the middle of the night? A man who could see shouldn’t have been doing it – Baze excepted himself only because he’d used this place for years, knew all the dangers and treacheries of the old walls.

Baze should’ve let him stand there and leave on his own! Of course he couldn’t, though, especially not seeing him clumsily make his way down from the pillar, his feet slipping, catching himself with one hand. Even the thought that Chirrut would fall and break his leg and then be left here until tomorrow morning’s commute started tightened Baze’s stomach. That was only a best case scenario, too. Chirrut might even manage to crack his skull open.

Chirrut turned towards the noise of Baze stomping steps as he approached. Before he could say anything, Baze grasped his forearm tight and pulled him back from the sloping ledge of the rooftop he’d been so precariously balancing on and unto the stable ground beside it.

“Are you out of your mind?!”

Hearing his voice, Chirrut relaxed, his arm losing its tension that worked against Baze’s grip.

“Not at all. I’d say I made a pretty good decision – I found you,” Chirrut said defiantly.

Baze exhaled.

“How did you know I’d be here?”

“When you told me of this place, I could hear it had significance to you. I figured it is where you go when you are trying to sort your thoughts.”

“Didn’t you figure I also wanted to be alone?” Baze snapped, almost squirming with how easily Chirrut seemed to see through him. “I know you don’t like to be told you can’t do something, but ruins at night aren’t a great place to practice climbing for a blind man. They are off-limits for a reason. You think the fence is there for decoration? I can tell you what the warning signs on it say.”

His own hypocrisy was not lost on Baze, considering he hung out here every chance he got, but it was different when it was Chirrut. He couldn’t risk him getting hurt – least because of Baze. That was the very reason he had left him tonight.

“It’s always pretty dark for me, so why does the time of day make a difference?”

“Just – come.”

It was impossible to argue with Chirrut. Baze tugged him along until he had reached the shadow of a high wall, where the ground was even under their feet and they were shielded from the wind.

“Why did you leave?” Chirrut asked.

Baze took another deep breath. He didn’t want to have to explain himself. The stupidest part of his brain was still clinging too hard to Chirrut. That part still wanted Chirrut to take him back with a smile.

“This is not gonna go anywhere, Chirrut. I – can’t.”

“Hm,” Chirrut said, lowering his head for a moment. “That’s unfortunate. I did think you liked me.”

“I do.” Baze wished he could have said those words without quite so much feeling in them. Chirrut already had an unfortunately deep insight into his emotions, he didn’t need to be given such strong pointers. Still, lying outright would have felt like the asshole thing to do right after he’d slept with the guy.

“So what is the problem?”

Baze shook his head.

“Come on, you’re not thirteen years old. It’s not enough – actually, it doesn’t matter a damn thing whether I like you or not. I’m not fit for life anymore. I don’t know what you think I’m going to turn into, that you’ll fix me up into a normal boyfriend, but it’s not going to work.”

“When did I ever ask that of you?”

Baze stopped himself from releasing the next part of his tirade already sitting on the tip of his tongue. He looked down at Chirrut whose face was as unmoving and stern as those of the stone figures surrounding them.

“I didn’t try to fix you,” Chirrut pointed out. “I asked you out on a date knowing you lived on the streets because it only matters to me in that I worry about you. If I really believed you were happy there, I wouldn’t care about it at all. I don’t have to change you, I already fell for you. I think you are the one who is angry you can’t be different.”

Running a hand over his face, Baze stared at him. This would’ve been a lot easier if Chirrut weren’t right.

“Then I don’t understand,” Baze said, finally, deflating. “Right now, I’m going to cause trouble for you and you’re smart enough to know that. What do you see in me?”

“You’re strong,” Chirrut answered.

“Are you kidding me? I threw my life away after I came back from the army.”

“No, you didn’t. You’re still alive. I told you already, many wouldn’t be, even if the war hadn’t taken them. You also have a kind heart, otherwise, why would you always be looking out for me?” Chirrut cocked his head. “It’s not like you don’t have problems of your own, yet you made mine yours.”

Baze watched him, the rain drenching his short hair, rolling down his forehead, over his nose and the heart-shaped lips. Suddenly, he realised that he would kiss Chirrut if he stood here listening to him much longer. When he said these things, they didn’t sound like flattery, they sounded like he honestly believed them – so much so that Baze almost could, too.

But as Baze had said, how much he liked Chirrut changed nothing.

“I almost hurt you,” he burst out.

“You did?”

“When we were in bed, your arm fell on my throat,” Baze confessed. “I didn’t realise it was you. Something in my brain just switched off. I was so close to punching you, I had my fist raised over your face – and you couldn’t even see. You were at my mercy, you trusted me. I was half a second away from knocking your front teeth out.”

Chirrut stood still for a moment, both hands loose around his stick as he contemplated this.

“Maybe you have to sleep on the couch for a while,” he decided, finally.

Baze shook his head, taking a few restless steps that went nowhere, only led him back in a circle to face Chirrut again.

“That’s not a solution – that’s just one thing. There’ll be more. What if I never get better?”

“What if you do? Wouldn’t you want to at least try?”

 _What for?_ Baze wanted to say because that had been his pitfall every time. To do something so monumentally difficult, something that didn’t even have a proper end, engage with something that could only ever be managed, not cured, you needed some really fucking good motivation to keep going.

He looked at Chirrut, rain still pearling over his face, blind eyes looking Baze’s way, a little off to the side.

“If it’s too much, you can always leave,” Chirrut reminded him. “But I don’t want to give up on you. I’m not afraid that other problems may arise. We will deal with each one in its own time.”

Baze took his arm again, but this time, he only pulled Chirrut into an embrace. He had a feeling that soon enough, leaving him wouldn’t be an option anymore.

“I can’t do it alone. I’m going to need your help,” he admitted, against every instinct in him.

Chirrut squeezed him tight in his arms. “Of course.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait, real life got quite mean-spirited for a while, but here I finally am with the last chapter. Thanks to everyone who read this story!

Baze moved in with Chirrut the night they returned together from the ruins. Before he came into the apartment, he picked up his clothes, but left the food stash of rusty cans in his hut, ignoring the twinge of unease that ignoring his street survival instincts settled him with. Upstairs, he threw his stuff in the washing machine, listening to it rumble as he got comfortable on the couch. Chirrut had kissed him goodnight, his lips still cold.

Starting his new life, the first order of business for Baze was to find something to do. Suddenly yanked from his routine of making sure he didn’t starve or freeze to death, there was a lot of time to fill. Quite a bit of his was still spent outside. Chirrut had classes most of the afternoon, anyway, and walls still felt oppressive after so long without them. At times, he would forget for minutes at a time that he had someplace to return to – but he always came back in the end.

He started by cleaning the apartment and keeping the equipment in the practice room in order. Chirrut was on top of that, but obviously he missed some spots and it all took him longer than necessary. Also, Baze risked getting an ulcer when he watched Chirrut climb up that shaky stepladder to wipe the windows, balancing on one foot as he stretched to get the corners.

It was one of those mornings that he rearranged the mats in the gym when Cassian Andor, one of Chirrut’s young friends, stuck his head around the door and regarded him with interest.

“You’re back,” he noted.

“I live here now.”

Andor raised a brow and looked over his shoulder. From the hall, Baze could hear the three-fold sound of Chirrut’s feet and stick.

“I didn’t know Mr. Malbus had moved in.”

“Didn’t Kay tell you? Rare for you two not to pass on gossip,” Chirrut said with a bemused smile as he stood in the doorway. “He is my boyfriend.”

The woman joined them, too – Jyn Erso, if he remembered correctly. She sent Cassian a quick look, but only inclined her head in a greeting.

“Can you get me a schedule for the weekend courses? One of my classmates wanted to know,” she asked Chirrut.

Chirrut led her outside again, leaving Andor and Baze to their own devices. Andor joined him to pick up one of the mats and stack it neatly on top of the others, still looking over his shoulder at Baze.

“Are you about to warn me or something?” Baze asked, finally. The thought of having a man a dozen years younger up in his face about who he was dating would have been funny if he hadn’t understood why Andor might be worried about his friend – if Baze hadn’t been worried himself, still thinking about that first night together.

Cassian snorted.

“I doubt Chirrut couldn’t deal with you if he needed to.”

“So what is it?”

“Nothing.” Andor paused, standing a mat on its edge as he held it up. “We just don’t know much about you, and I know if I ask Chirrut he’s just going to tell me to ask you.”

Baze felt like telling Andor it wasn’t his business, but picking a fight with Chirrut’s friends straightaway seemed like a stupid idea.

“I was with the army. Haven’t been for a while. Didn’t really find anything to do with myself afterwards,” he said curtly.

To his surprise, Andor’s expression softened a little.

“Ah, alright,” he said, and Baze had a feeling he must’ve answered some other, unasked question, as well.

“Were you on duty, too?” Baze guessed, curious about the sudden change in his demeanour.

“No, but – something like that. Seen a bit of combat.” Pushing the map up onto the top of the tower, Andor regarded him briefly. “If Chirrut trusts you, you can’t be too bad. He has strange ideas, but good instinct.”

“I really hope so. He does say the Force guides him,” Baze muttered, sarcasm tingeing his voice.

Andor snorted.

“It seems to have worked for him so far,” he admitted.

-

Baze picked up other duties here and there. He was getting better in the kitchen and while he didn’t have the patience or education for the bookkeeping side of the business, he could do things like check if all members had paid their bills in much shorter time than Chirrut and his speech program. Slowly, over weeks and months, the grey stretches of empty time disappeared. Erso told him about the university library, which was state-funded and gave free passes even to people who weren’t students, so he borrowed books, mostly crime stories. Sometimes, Chirrut would make him read to him, even though he had an online subscription to an audio book service.

“It’s different when you read them,” he claimed.

“You mean worse?”

But Baze did it anyway, of course.

Chirrut was rather sneaky when it came to giving Baze gifts. He would make Baze choose a new shirt for him, which was fairly sensible seeing as he couldn’t look at them, and then got it in Baze’s size. Thanks to his formerly documented dislike of the supermarket and Baze being the better cook, it also followed logic that he sent him shopping with just a vague idea of what they needed, allowing Baze use the household budget as he pleased.

“When I hung up your pants after washing, I noticed they are frayed at the bottom. You should get new ones,” Chirrut said over dinner one evening.

“I can fix them a couple more times. I don’t like you spending that much money on me.”

“With all the things you do around here, if you weren’t my boyfriend, I think I’d be paying you,” Chirrut pointed out. “It’s our money now. That sort of arrangement is fairly standard among more traditional couples, isn’t it?”

When he had been eighteen and in boot camp, the idea that he might someday end up as someone’s house-husband would have had Baze bristling with wounded pride. Now, he smiled softly and was happy Chirrut couldn’t see it.

-

It was a good thing he was a boyfriend, though, not a paid employee, because some days, Baze didn’t do anything at all. The routine helped, of course, preparing tea every morning, sitting next to Chirrut as they listened to the news on the radio, but since no primary instinct forced him to move, sometimes he couldn’t. Other days, he left the house without a word and returned late at night after wandering through the city and stopping to watch the highway, or sitting in the Sky Temple again. Chirrut never interfered much with him at those times. It didn’t take him long to develop a sixth sense for Baze’s mood.

There was one night when he came back around three in the morning and Chirrut was standing in the hallway as he turned the key in the lock.

“The hell you still doing up?” Baze asked, slapping the door shut behind himself. He saw the furrows on Chirrut’s forehead.

“There was First Order terrorist attack near the ruins. I heard it on television. I didn’t know whether you’d been there.”

With guilt in the pit of his stomach, Baze cupped Chirrut’s face with one hand.

“It’s all good. I was outside the city.”

Slowly, Chirrut nodded his head.

“Can you take my old cell phone and send me a message if you stay out this late?” Chirrut asked.

To giving away that much freedom, Baze could agree.

-

He had never hurt Chirrut again but once, when one morning after a sleepless night he’d thought that through the window he’d seen a sniper on the rooftop across the street. All instinct, he had pushed Chirrut out of the way, slamming him into the wall. He’d apologised a hundred times. Eventually, Chirrut had told him to stop.

“You were protecting me,” he’d said.

Baze didn’t think that made much of a difference but finally, he accepted Chirrut’s forgiveness.

-

Chirrut had asked him a few times if Baze didn’t want to see a psychiatrist, but Baze remained stubborn. He would meditate with Chirrut, he liked doing tai chi with him in the evenings, but he was not going to tell a stranger his life story, even if they had gone to university for six years to be qualified to nod their head. If he didn’t believe in it, then it couldn’t work, and all it would result in would be him sitting on a sofa for an hour in defiant silence.

He had long been convinced that he wouldn’t ever tell anyone about his time in the army, period. Those horrors were best contained in his own head, driving only one person mad. For months, this stayed true, and then it came in bits and pieces. Sometimes he would point out what exactly bothered him when he was getting nervous, just so Chirrut could help it stop. Then, he found himself mentioning a dead man from his unit once as they talked about an annoying customer Chirrut had dealt with that day.

One long Saturday, Baze had spent all day feeling like the memories of the war were going to crawl out of him like cockroaches, as if his head would burst with the images, and finally, out of things to try, he turned to Chirrut next to him on the couch, who was busying himself with a book in Braille.

“Can I tell you something from the war?”

Chirrut stared at the wall, mouth opened in silent surprise, then nodded.

At first, he told him of the base and of their tours around the country, of the bad food, the hard beds. He talked for hours about irrelevant shit and Chirrut never raised a word in complaint. Then, when he was talking about some prank a few young recruits had played on a general, he mentioned they’d all died later. He told him how they’d died. And suddenly, he couldn’t stop speaking of murders he’d seen, murders he’d committed, of the smell of bodies rotting in the sun and the metal taste of blood and the feeling of sitting in a city with drones flying overhead so often you feared looking at the sky; he told him about hearing someone die over the com frequency, and of the sound of a grenade exploding one room over. Chirrut looked off into the middle distance, with an expression as if he saw it all in his head, perfectly silent yet obviously attentive.

That night, drained to the bone, Baze fell asleep in the bed for the first time. He’d visited Chirrut there before, obviously, for sex, to doze, to read, but he’d never dared sleeping there again. However, as he startled himself awake, he found that the weight on him wasn’t what had shocked him this time, that all that was wrong was that he didn’t quite know where he was. In fact, his arm had instinctively tightened around Chirrut, whose head was resting on his shoulder, his arm draped across Baze’s middle; Baze had taken him into that bubble, that tight little space of what he needed to keep safe.

The movement had woken Chirrut. He yawned.

“You’re still here?” he asked, puzzled.

“Yes.” Baze paused. “I have nightmares, I’ll wake you up again. I should go.”

He’d never been the screaming kind, but he certainly found himself kicking pillows across the room and almost rolling onto the floor. Couldn’t be comfortable for someone else.

“It’s fine,” Chirrut answered. “Let’s give it a try. Do you want me to sleep on the other side of the bed?”

Baze hesitated once more.

“No.”

If he did, Baze would lose track of him again, might pick him up as a shadow from the past. As long as he was this close, Baze would be fine, for tonight, anyway.

And if he made it through tonight, that was a good start.

-

“I haven’t seen these punks around a lot lately. They used to hang around here after class.”

Baze looked up from the reception desk he’d been cleaning out with Kay. The guy talking to Chirrut was a student who came at least three times a week, an older gentleman who always asked Chirrut too many questions in class and was usually the first one to show up dressed in a blindingly turquoise jogging suit.

“No. I think they don’t like the look of my partner,” Chirrut said, with a chuckle.

That compliment Baze was willing to take. The truth of the matter was that many of the First Order thugs were young idiots. Quite a few of them had learned it was a bad idea to take on Chirrut, but whenever a new batch of them heard of the blind man who’d snatched away a business venture, they wanted to try to get some easy glory – and, as he had seen, there was a limit to what Chirrut could fend off when he was rushed six to one by armed men.

But now Baze was here and suddenly Chirrut wasn’t such an easy target anymore. Not only were there two of them, neither useless in a fight, leaving them no more easy pickings for a bunch of cowards, Baze was also aware that even dressed in clean clothes, he was still a mean-looking bastard. People had always thought twice about picking a fight with him and now that he made a point of chasing off thugs who got too close to the studio, the Tai Chi Centre didn’t seem like it was worth the effort anymore.

The man turned to look at Baze, who raised a hand to be identified.

“Helpful, that! Yes, I’ve seen you around here. I wondered if you were a teacher.”

“I moved in with Chirrut.”

“Ah, very good! Very good. See, lots of people don’t take that step anymore. Back in my day – well, I don’t want to bore you, but back in _my_ day, you didn’t test the waters for years, if you know what I mean.”

“Going too slow was probably not an issue for them,” Kay said quietly, leaning over his keyboard. Baze kicked the back of his chair.

“We were friends first,” Chirrut supplied, smiling at the man

“That’s a good way to do it – how my daughter met her husband actually.” With a fatherly pat on Chirrut’s shoulder, he nodded towards the dressing rooms. “I’ll see you next Tuesday, Mr. Îmwe.”

“May the Force of others protect you, Mr. Awat”

“Well, I thank your Force he got _you_ this time, Chirrut,” Kay said, when Mr. Awat had closed the door behind himself. “He kept me from my work for twenty minutes last time I made the mistake of being around when he came out.”

“I find him easy to talk to. He does most of the speaking and requires almost no answers. And he’s not unkind,” Chirrut said, stepping up to the desk.

“At least you got his blessing. I suppose we can look forward to wedding bells in a couple months if you continue at this pace…”

“If we do marry, you’re not getting an invitation,” Baze said, smiling briefly as he put his arm around Chirrut’s waist and pulled him closer to his side.

“Was that a proposal?” Chirrut joked.

Baze kissed him, saying nothing. He’d been putting his life on hold for a damn long while; it only made sense to want to catch up.

In a world that had crumbled around him, Chirrut had been the first thing he could be sure about again. Baze might have done a lot of stupid things in his time, but if Chirrut didn’t send him away, he doubted he’d ever be foolish enough to leave.


End file.
